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Last month, a federal judge in New York dismissed a lawsuit brought forth on behalf of two chubby teenagers. They claimed that McDonald's had made them fat -- one of them weighs more than 400 pounds -- and thus susceptible to maladies that ranged from diabetes to heart attacks.
Did McDonald's hold a gun to their heads, imprison them, and force them to chow down on Big Macs with Supersize fries morning, noon and night?
Of course not. Instead, the impressionable youngsters
saw slogans like McChicken Everyday! and
Big 'n'
Tasty Everyday, and apparently concluded that this was
good advice, instead of normal commercial puffery.
They also alleged that McDonald's products were
addictive, thus leading to foreseeable misuse,
and
thus the fast-food company acted irresponsibly.
Naturally, the critics of the litigation industry had much to say, all negative, about this frivolous lawsuit. After all, those kids had choices about where to spend their meal money, and they certainly could have known that most nutritionists do not recommend a constant diet of beef fat, sugar, salt, dimethylpolysiloxane and the like. If making that choice made the them unhealthy, that's their problem.
That's more or less what Judge D.J. Sweet wrote:
If a person knows or should know that eating copious
orders of supersized McDonald's' products is unhealthy and
may result in weight gain (and its concomitant problems)
because of high levels of cholesterol, fat, salt and sugar,
it is not the place of the law to protect them from their
own excesses. Nobody is forced to eat at McDonald's.
(Except, perhaps, parents of small children who desire
McDonald's food, toy promotions or playgrounds and demand
their parents' accompaniment.) Even more pertinent, nobody
is forced to supersize their meal or choose less healthy
options on the menu.
Despite the judge's sensible ruling, this issue is unlikely to disappear. For one thing, there are millions of obese Americans (I'm one of them, a good 20 pounds over the chart). As good Americans, we would prefer to blame somebody else, rather than our own lack of willpower in the presence of tasty aromas, for our poundage and associated health risks.
For another, trial lawyers see a bonanza somewhere down the road. Just as they did with tobacco and asbestos, they'll persist until they find a court that will grant them a big settlement, some fraction of which their class-action clients may even see.
That said, my first thought after reading up on this litigation was that they might have a case -- not against McDonald's, but against their schools.
After all, if there were things that they should have known, but didn't, isn't that at least partly the fault of the school system that was supposed to teach them things like nutrition and propaganda analysis?
It's been 35 years since I was in high school, but I can still remember a health class that taught us about the evils of marijuana, the horrors of venereal diseases and the dangers of too much greasy food. Granted, my skeptical friends and I devoted considerable effort toward determining whether the teacher was really telling us the the truth. But the point here is that we were informed by those whose duty was to educate us, and after that, it was up to us.
In another class, we learned to find the propaganda
techniques often used in advertising, like the bandwagon
(Everybody else has one
) and the irrelevant
celebrity endorsement.
Are schoolchildren today getting the same sort of
knowledge? And if not, could that be because our schools
are being taken over by the junk-food industry? Pepsi and
Coca-Cola pay millions to school districts to have
exclusive distribution on campus, along with promotional
signage -- few schools, under these circumstances, are
likely to be telling students that This stuff has an
addictive drug, caffeine. It rots your teeth and makes you
fat, so go easy on it if you use it at all.
In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a survey and found that more than 20 percent of schools sell McDonald's hamburgers, Pizza Hut pizzas and other name-brand fast foods. Throw in the promotions, like winning junk food if you read a certain number of books, and you've got pretty good penetration of our educational system.
So it appears the fast-food industry is trying to have
it both ways. It argues that a case should be dismissed
because people should know better, but also influences our
educational system to keep people from knowing better.
We're not responsible for the fast-food industry, but we
are responsible for our public schools, and it could be
time to be sure that students indeed know better,
even if it means going without fast-food money.
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