On July 7, however, lawyers for Daily Harvest moved to halt the suit and send the matter to arbitration, as per the agreement Ready unwittingly accepted when she subscribed. I want them to do better-and unfortunately, the way people learn is through the legal system.” And I want Daily Harvest and companies like Daily Harvest to improve their practices. “I want to heal, both physically and emotionally. She filed her lawsuit, she says, because she wants accountability. “If something that was supposed to be healthy made me this ill, how can I trust anything?“Īnd despite having health insurance through her employer, Ready says she’s facing thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket medical expenses. “I’m afraid I’ll get sick again,” she says. The episode has also made her fearful of eating. Nearly a month after the surgery, Ready says she’s still having such severe gastrointestinal problems that she’s afraid to be far from home, can’t resume her exercise routine, and hasn’t been able to conduct the research she’d planned for the summer. Then, on the very morning of her surgery, a friend forwarded her a Reddit thread in which Daily Harvest customers had been complaining about illness and connecting the dots. Why would I assume this was the thing that made me sick?” she says. “This stuff is supposed to be really healthy for me. On June 24, she had her gallbladder removed.Įven after the second episode, Ready didn’t connect the lentil dish to her illness. The second time, she spent four days in the hospital, where doctors diagnosed her with liver and gallbladder dysfunction and prescribed opioids to manage the pain. The company says it has ruled out a large number of pathogens and other issues but has not determined the precise cause other than pointing to one ingredient, tara flour.Īccording to a lawsuit her lawyers filed in late June, Ready went to the emergency room with intense abdominal pain, gastrointestinal distress, and other ailments two separate times after eating the lentils, first on May 7 and again on May 28. To date, it remains unclear why the lentil dish caused so many to fall ill. It has since come to light that at least 25 people who consumed the food also lost their gallbladder. (Read about the Daily Harvest recall of French Lentil and Leek Crumbles.) By June 23, when the Food and Drug Administration announced that 28,000 units of the product had been recalled, Daily Harvest had received 470 reports of illness or adverse effects. Ready, a Spanish and linguistics professor at Oklahoma State University, wasn’t the only Daily Harvest customer to fall ill after eating a dish the company calls French Lentil and Leek Crumbles, which is delivered frozen. “If companies are making mistakes, they can literally kill people.” The arbitration system “is particularly troubling in a food-safety setting,” he says. Paul Bland, executive director of the nonprofit legal advocacy organization Public Justice, agrees. “Obtaining information about an outbreak is essential for regulators in identifying the root cause and preventing additional illnesses." "What’s troubling about these arbitration clauses is that their secretive nature can create substantial public health problems if it means foodborne illness investigations are delayed,” says Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at CR and a former food safety official at the Department of Agriculture. Supreme Court.īut the issue has special salience in the context of food companies because the public health stakes are so high. Today, companies of all kinds, from telecoms to financial service providers to manufacturers, force arbitration agreements on their customers-with the blessing of judges all the way up to the U.S. This pattern is part of a much broader “arbitration revolution,” as some experts have described it, decades in the making. (You can see which ones in the table below.) A Consumer Reports review of the more than 20 popular online meal kit service websites found that most, but not all, require customers to accept similar arbitration provisions. If you’ve ever ordered food from a similar service, you too have probably “agreed” to arbitrate potential disputes, whether you knew it or not. She did-and with that, she unwittingly accepted the company’s terms of use, forfeiting her right to take it to court. When Ready, 30, subscribed to Daily Harvest in January 2022, the company’s website prompted her to “See if we deliver to you” by entering her ZIP code and email address, then clicking a box labeled “Let’s Go.”
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