Consumer Law

Yesterday (April 9), the Wall Street Journal ran an excellent article by Nathan Koppel on the changes to food companies' practices brought about by litigation, or the threat thereof. And by "excellent," I mean that it fairly and completely gave both sides of the issue.

This is, of course, not the kind of excellence that food companies, or the lawyers who profit from their predations, like to see. So the Journal also posted a blog entry that talked about Koppel's article. The blog entry is itself sufficiently fair and balanced, but it allowed for comments from the blinkered defenders of all things corporate.

Comments like:

• "Consumers never wanted to know the exact health risks from smoking." (This makes me think of Jack Nicholson screaming "You can't handle the truth!")
• "If its citizens want to know, then the free market provide the information, and at a cost much lower than any government mandate." (This is the kind of thinking that loosed people like Bernie Madoff on our pocketbooks.)
• And this gem, from a PepsiCo lawyer, who opines that "food litigation is part of a larger 'paternalization of society,' adding that such litigation 'in effect, says the masses aren?t intelligent enough to understand what they are buying.'"

No sir, it's not a matter of intelligence, it's ignorance, and not the blissful kind. Exactly what the food companies (many of which really can't handle the truth) are counting on, and indeed fostering.

However, sometimes the efforts of food marketers to blinker the public do not succeed, so that they are forced to respond to consumer demand, when consumers learn the truth about their products.

Products such as Snapple, which called itself "natural" and "made from the best stuff on Earth," while using the very unnatural high-fructose corn syrup instead of sugar. Responding to informed consumer demand, Snapple has begun the change to sugar, now saying that "The Best Stuff on Earth Just Got Better." Congrats to Snapple for having found the true Aristotelian Ideal, something that surpasses "best"--the adjectival progression is now, "good, better, best, Snappliester."

I am struck over and over by the food companies? (and their defenders?) knee-jerk use of words like ?paternalism? and ?consumer choice,? when the simple fact is that companies are hiding from consumers the precise information necessary for consumers to make informed choices. Our economic system is based on the free flow of information, but that flow has to be two-way. For companies to hide from consumers facts, knowing that consumers would make different choices if they knew the truth, is contra to the principles on which our system is based.

When companies try to cheat their way around the truth, it hurts consumers and it hurts honest competitors.

This isn?t paternalism; it?s capitalism.