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Lawyers, Buns and Money
It has been one of the food industry’s abiding dreads for years, ranking right up there with ironclad proof that preservatives cause cancer, and the invention of a pill that eliminates hunger. And now that dread is becoming reality. The lawyers who took down the tobacco industry have decided that it’s time to visit their litigative skills upon the likes of Heinz, Hunt’s, General Mills, PepsiCo and ConAgra. These and other major food producers have in the past half-year been targeted by various legal veterans of the tobacco wars as defendants in more than two dozen lawsuits that charge them with misrepresenting, in various ways, the nutritional value of their products.
Most of the lawsuits seem fairy temperate compared to the tobacco cases — nobody is flat-out accusing Big Food of selling what is essentially a lethal product to the public. There’s no “Doritos killed my husband” drama involved. The cases mostly involve shady wording in package labels, nutritional claims, and ingredients lists, and tend to involve phrases such as “all natural” and “heart healthy.” But some cases, notably those filed by the wily tobacco vets, go after food products for so flagrantly misidentifying some ingredient as to be in violation of federal labeling regulations, such as the yogurt company that lists liquid sugar as “evaporated cane juice.”
A guilty verdict in those cases could require not just ceasing and desisting, but forking over punitive damages based on the offending products’ gross revenues. The very thought makes food executives wince with pain. And it could get even worse. In some cases, such as Swiss Miss cocoa and Hunt’s canned tomatoes, the lawsuits’ objective is to actually halt sales of the product, a thought that turns mere wincing into a heart attack.
The food companies under siege respond that these suits are merely examples of product liability law gone mad, and spring not from any matter of principle but from lawyers’ pursuit of ever more profits — which is as true as it is that the same pursuit moved the food companies to engage in the deceptions to begin with. The defendants make energetic use of their three favorite words, “frivolous” and “without merit,” but they’re worried, and with good reason.
Up to now, most such lawsuits have been launched by public interest law firms, motivated — and constrained — by ideological principles and commitments to fairness and integrity. The tobacco vets, by comparison, not only play hardball, but with hand grenades. These are lawyers who sensed when it was time to go after the tobacco companies, and they pursued those companies relentlessly, even through early courtroom defeats, like Terminators with briefcases. Ultimately they prevailed, and the nicotine industry has yet to recover.
And now they’re tracking the food companies, probably because they sense that an increasingly health-conscious public will provide them with amenable juries. And they begin with one considerable advantage. The most successful defense used by the cigarette makers was that nobody forced people to smoke, that they did so out of free choice. But we don’t have a choice when it comes to eating.
And while it’s true that we can choose which food items to eat, most of us base those choices on what we are led to believes the food items consist of, which brings us face to face with the issue of manufacture liability. Nobody ever bought a pack of Camels because they claimed to be 100 percent natural and loaded with valuable nutrients. But people do buy cereals and juices and frozen entrees and other packaged goods based on exactly such claims. And increasingly, it seems, when those claims turn out to be less than honest, it’s going to be See you in court.
Now, I have no interest in cheering on or endorsing rapacious courtroom cutthroats, but as legal trends go, this one has a singular saving grace: The food industry might just decide that it’s cheaper, and better PR, to produce healthy, nutritious, honestly marketed products than to wade through years of litigative slime. I’m all for that.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):
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Having Wrung a Fortune From Tobacco Inc., Law Firms Now Eyeing Food Inc. is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog
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