BBC Profile: Big Tobacco Lawyers Target Big Food
Attorney Don Barrett
demands mislabelled food be "taken off the shelves"
- Common Dreams staff
Published on Tuesday, October 16, 2012 by Common Dreams
Published on Tuesday, October 16, 2012 by Common Dreams
More than a dozen
lawyers who took on big tobacco in the 1990's have turned their attention to
the food industry and the criminal mislabeling of food products. BBC Newsnight spoke with Don Barrett, one of the attorney's
who's career capstone was the decade-long battle that forced tobacco companies
to admit they knew cigarettes were addictive.
Attorney Don Barrett, made famous by the 1998 Big Tobacco
settlement, is going after the food industry. (Photo by James Patterson for the
New York Times)"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," the Mississippi
attorney told BBC. "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."
The tobacco attorneys
are taking an aggressive tack, claiming that companies are "misrepresenting
their products, promoting them as 'natural' or 'healthy', when […] they are no
such thing."
Barrett's team is
focusing on the mislabeling of food and the prevailing practice of ingredient
euphemisms. “It’s a crime—and that makes it a crime to sell it,” Barrett told The New York Times. “That means these products should
be taken off the shelves.”
One example he gives
is hidden sugars in processed food. Barrett cites the example of greek yogurt
maker, Chobani Inc—one of their targets—which lists "evaporated cane
juice" as an ingredient in their pomegranate-flavored yogurt, rather than
sugar. According to the suit filed earlier this year, the FDA has repeatedly
warned companies not to use the term because it is “false and misleading.” In
total, the attorneys filed 25 cases against food industry players that also
include ConAgra Foods, PepsiCo, Heinz and General Mills.
Barrett draws a
parallel between his infamous tobacco lawsuits and this latest round:
"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."
Another similarity is
the money at stake. Big Tobacco ended up settling for more than $200 billion in
1998. The suits against Big Food are class actions, where the class is defined
as every person who purchased one of the misbranded products in the previous
four years. For most of the food companies targeted, that could also amount to
billions.
"I'm 68 years
old, frankly I don't need the cash, the law's been good to me." According to BBC, what gets
Barrett fired up is the epidemic of obesity among young people; the US Centers
for Disease Control (CDC) reports around two thirds of Americans over the age
of 20 are now obese or overweight.
"This is my job,
but here we have an opportunity to really help people."
FINALLY!
ReplyDeleteI get violently ill from consuming anything containing rapeseed or its various names....canola or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil or brominated vegetable oil. They are all different names, but pain me just the same.
Canola products are rampant in falsly labeled organic foods. I wish them the best.