Lawyer takes on Big Food page

[Goosejuggler]

BBC News - Big Tobacco lawyers target food industry

I hope this ends in a serious smack-down against Big Food.

Nobody's trying to tell the American people what they have to eat or what they cannot eat, the American people can make those decisions for themselves. It's all about free choice. To have free choice you have to have accurate information. That means Big Food, the food companies, have to start telling the truth about what's in their product. The law requires it."

He does see similarities with the tobacco lawsuits. "One parallel is that the American people assume that if a product is legal to sell, then these people are telling the truth about this product. If it's legal to sell, it must be ok, otherwise the government would have done something about it. And that's what they thought about cigarettes."

[Lewis]

I wondered what this was going to be based on. It says:

Mr Barrett's case against Big Food is that companies are misrepresenting their products, promoting them as "natural" or "healthy", when in fact, he says, they are no such thing.

His mission is to make them stick to the letter of existing laws which, he says, regulators have been too weak to enforce. He says that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which oversees food safety in the US, has merely been writing warning letters, which he thinks will not be enough.

That sounds fair enough to me. Food labelling is a can of worms. There is law in this area but it's being ignored. If the body that's supposed to regulate that is effectively choosing not to, or to do little more than make gestures, then it would seem like time to take it to the courts.

[JoanieL]

There is a revolving door between Big Food and the FDA. It's the fox watching the henhouse. How strict would you be if your next job after the FDA was for the very companies you were overseeing?

His thing about evaporated cane juice is a bit much. Yes, I guess they should put evaporated sugar cane juice, but wouldn't the sugars be listed on the nutrtional portion of the label anyway?

Anyway, it's a start.