Originally published at: Meet the lawyer behind deceptive marketing lawsuits like the strawberry Pop-Tarts case | Boing Boing
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Obviously, some of these cases are silly. Obviously, greedy lawyers will mine the situation for all it’s worth. Until the marketing departments of these corporations stop misrepresenting what’s in the food they sell, though, that’s the price we pay in Idiot America.
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“He’s gone after companies that use"fudge” labels on products without milkfat, a company that make Hawaiian rolls outside of Hawaii […] "
Can’t wait for him to find out about Mars bars.
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His dream is that one day someone will come to him complaining about Circus Peanuts. However, those things are so awful that day will never come.
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Or Three Musketeers. “Are they made from real…?”
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So this grifter plugs the courts with his get-rich-quick schemes while there are thousands of insurrectionists who still haven’t seen the inside of a prison yet?
This is why we can’t have nice justice.
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I love those!
But if you eat a bunch they definitely make you sick.
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As a consumer, I have no respect for this parasite. He gets wealthy by clogging the tax-payer funded courts with frivolous lawsuits until he gets a sympathetic judge, marginally driving up the cost of consumer goods whether he wins or not because these companies have to defend themselves, the cost of which is passed on to the consumer. Everyone else pays coming and going for this ambulance chaser to make a mockery of the law over labels everyone already knows are bullshit marketing hype.
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William Shakespeare Henry VI, Part 2* , Act IV, Scene 2
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At first I thought this lawyer was some kind of opportunistic jerk or petty idiot, but the more I think about it, the less disapproving I become. I was thinking about how to characterize the enemy in these cases, and I thought about calling them “Big Food” the way we might say “Big Energy” or “Big Pharma” to describe a clearly predatory industrial sector. But based on these legal cases, we’re not dealing with “food” per se, but rather chemical garbage masquerading as food. Capitalists have gotten very adept at controlling the legislation that defines “food” and manipulating the regulatory agencies that might stop them from selling cheap, harmful crap in place of food. I cannot in good conscience blame a lawyer who seems to specialize in fighting back against this kind of deep and abiding fraud.
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Dick the Butcher had the right idea, back then. Plus ça change…
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i think there’s definitely an argument that suing companies for misleading or dangerous products is the american system working as designed
the alternative would be some sort of government consumer protection agency, and we know how people feel about that 
if there aren’t lawyers doing this and if government won’t or can’t, then what’s left?
( side note: the republican party wants not only limited government but also tort reform to make suing companies more difficult. so they for sure don’t want any checks or balances on corporations. )
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It sounds like sure, he’s probably greedy and making bank off of this, but aside from that… honestly, sounds like good work. I don’t see why food companies shouldn’t be held accountable for constantly lying and misleading consumers. All the examples listed sound like false advertising to me.
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So one of the things I learned when I was dieting and calories counting, was, in the US, labels are allowed to be off by up to 25% PER SERVING with their calorie counts. That 25% can go either way.
So, if it says 200 calories per serving, and their serving size is unreasonably small. (Like, I’ve seen cereal with 1/4 cup serving sizes before) , that means that serving size can have as little as 150 calories and as much as 250 calories. Now, multiply that out by 4 for a full cup of cereal, and suddenly what they hint as 200 calories could have as much as 1000 calories for a legitimate serving. An 800 calorie difference if you’re not paying attention. Even if you ARE paying attention and get the serving sizes right, that’s up to a 200 calorie difference from what you think you’re eating.
If you want to lose a pound a week, you have to cut 3500 calories from your diet per week. That’s 500 calories per day. If your BMR says your body burns 1900 calories, that means you should eat 1400 calories. If those 1400 calories come from labeled foods, to be safe , you need to aim for 25% less. So 1050 calories.
And this is just a rant about calories. They’re allowed to lie and make things up about literally every single thing that goes on this label. The technology absolutely exists for them to be FAR more accurate, in fact, EU labeling laws require just that. So, while, yes, I’m tired of greedy lawyers doing shitty things… there’s also such lax labeling regulations in the US that we literally have reached a point where NOTHING on the label can be believed, and it’s nice to see someone fighting that.
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I thought stuff like this is the reason food companies use terms like “Strawberry flavored Pop Tarts”.
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Did you truly think there were significant amounts of actual strawberry in strawberry Pop Tarts?
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Do you really think there SHOULD be?
This cynical “Did you really trust a big company?” is blaming the people who’ve been wronged (even mildly) by this behavior. Yes. There should be significant, even MEASURABLE amounts of strawberries in something marketed as “Strawberry” and “Made with Real Fruit.” Expecting such is not ridiculous and should never be. It’s absolutely shitty to take the view that this is somehow “Karen’ing” or “that everyone knows it doesn’t have real strawberries.”
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