Livingston

I. Introduction

The question in this case is whether a restaurant offering vegetable soup “made ¿rom the freshest ingredients, from scratch, . . . every day,” has an affirmative obligation to warn customers the soup contains monosodium glutamate (MSG). Plaintiff, David Livingston, alleges he suffered a severe adverse reaction after consuming a bowl of Marie Callenders’s vegetable soup. It is undisputed the soup contained MSG. Had plaintiff known the soup contained MSG, he would not have eaten it. The trial court dismissed plaintiff’s strict liability claim on the ground, as a matter of law, there was nothing wrong with the soup, or the MSG in the soup. Plaintiff contends that, pursuant to section 402A of the Restatement Second of Torts, comment j, a cause of action for strict liability failure to warn exists where a product “contains an ingredient to which a substantial number of the population are allergic, and the ingredient is one whose danger is not generally known, or if known is one which the consumer would reasonably not expect to find in the *833 product, [and the seller] has knowledge, or by the application of reasonable, developed human skill and foresight…