SECTION V – DEFINITIONS 1. "Advertisement" means a notice that is broadcast or published to the general public or specific market segments about your goods, products or services for the purpose of attracting customers or supporters. For the purposes of this definition: a. Notices that are published include material placed on the Internet or on similar electronic means of communication; and b. Regarding web-sites, only that part of a website that is about your goods, products or services for the purposes of attracting customers or supporters is considered an advertisement.

If the book contained errors in a recipe in any way, such as in the proper handling of food or kitchen tools, cooking temperature, the ingredient list, or even included an inadequate ingredient listing that might lead the cook to add for example a non-edible mushroom in the recipe, any of these situations could lead to injury or illness that would fall under the your product exclusion in the CGL.

If however, a person just became sick from making a recipe wherein they used eggs that contained salmonella, there would not be any liability on the part of the insured for such a scenario.

We searched but were unable to locate any specific cases where cookbook authors have been sued for bodily injury arising from a recipe, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. Here is what we did find which you might find helpful. . In one Florida case, Cardozo v. True, 342 So. 2d 1053 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 1977), a lady who bought a cookbook sampled a piece of an uncooked ingredient that was poisonous when uncooked; of course, she got very sick and ended up in the hospital. She sued the bookstore where she bought the cookbook for improper instructions/warnings and breach of implied warranty of fitness for a particular use. The Florida Court of Appeal found the bookstore wasn't liable because the implied warranty of fitness was limited to the physical book and did not extend to the material in the book; the Florida Supreme Court declined to review the case. The lady also sued the author of the cookbook, but the author never responded, as far as we can tell. The case specifically stated that the author was not part of the suit, and we couldn't find any subsequent history of the case other than the denial by the Florida Supreme Court, so we cannot say if the author was ever held liable.

In Winter v. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 938 F.2d 1033 (9th Cir. 1991), the plaintiffs, who became ill after eating certain mushrooms described in "The Encyclopedia of Mushrooms," sued the publisher of the book, not the author. The original author and editors were based in Great Britain, and the plaintiffs sued the American publisher who distributed the book under products liability, breach of warranty, and multiple facets of negligence. The claims against the publisher failed because the actual information in the book, e.g. pictures, statements, were not "products" for the purposes of strict liability under products liability. The defendant wasn't liable under any of the posited negligence theories because "a publisher does not have a duty to investigate the accuracy of the text it publishes."

In another case, a claimant purported that her guests became ill from a meal she prepared by following a recipe just as it was presented in a popular cookbook. Allegedly, she suffered great embarrassment and loss of reputation as a result. The defendant provided proof that all the recipes were tested before publication. The case was dismissed based on insufficient evidence, but the defense costs and potential damage to the publisher's reputation were sizeable.