Nice Megan McArdle Salon piece on the incipient movement to litigate the everlovin’ saturated fat out of junk food:

Lawyers and activists, flush from the tobacco victories, think they have found [a solution to obesity]: Sue the companies who sell us the junk we overeat. They talk about recovering the costs of obesity-associated diseases. But the real hope is that by going after the companies, they can force changes in price and marketing that will, in turn, force us to stop eating so much junk food. Corporations, after all, are much easier to regulate than the fractious individuals targeted by most public health campaigns.

There are a lot of reasons why the new legal strategy is unlikely to work. Fast food isn’t as easy to pinpoint as a killer as tobacco, and legal experts can point to an additional array of factors that will make finding corporate scapegoats for obesity far more challenging than bringing Philip Morris to heel. There are a host of legal issues, they say, that will make it difficult to even get such cases heard in front of a judge. And aside from legal strategems, successfully suing the likes of McDonald’s and KFC will require a dramatic shift in the way the public thinks about overeating — taking the focus off the individual’s responsibility for what he eats, and placing it on those corporations.

But we may be seeing the beginnings of that shift in two recent books: Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, and Food Politics by Marion Nestle. Both have advanced the argument that the way food companies manufacture and market their products makes them bear serious responsibility for our current crisis. And now George Washington University Law Professor John Banzhaf, a veteran of the tobacco battles, has publicly declared that he thinks it possible to sue companies like McDonald’s for misleading advertising, for failure to warn about the health dangers of their products and, if public opinion swings his way, for, well, making us fat.

If Banzhaf is right, we should all be nervous. Because if such cases do make it to court, they could be devastating. The economic costs alone are potentially staggering, and not just to the companies involved; the increased liability risk to all companies would almost certainly mean rising insurance premiums and interest rates, lowered profit margins and stifled innovation for fear of litigation. Not to mention the cost to our sense of justice. If you can’t be held responsible for what you put in your mouth, what are you responsible for?

Indeed. People who eat large hunks of breaded, deep fried string cheese are not doing so because they believe it’s healthy — rather, they’re doing so because they like the taste and are willing to live with the consequences. And if not, they should be, which is an equally important observation.

Besides: by the logic of this particular brand of nanny-state activism, those companies guilty of a “failure to warn about the health dangers of their products” are the ones who pass off fattening products such as nuts or granola as “healthy” — not those restaurants selling big breaded onions.

Related: Matt Welch on Ralph Nader’s pandering characterization of fast food restaurants as weapons of mass destruction. Note the comments section.

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