Some Food For Disquieting Thought

The thing about food is we all eat it.

Ever notice how most of us would prefer it not be rotten, contaminated or otherwise harmful? So it’s amazing that there is a raging national debate - actually a dust-up among a handful of vexatious lawyers - over whether Americans should be free to criticize food.

I’ve known husbands to complain for years that their wife’s lasagna tastes like marinated cardboard. And I’ve known of a household where the wife once told the breadwinner, “Sure, you can have a hot breakfast once in a while. Just set fire to your corn flakes.” Americans love to whine about food. Who of us hasn’t felt put down when we go to a restaurant and like the food, only to find some uppity restaurant critic has panned the place as a gustatory atrocity with dime-store ambience and slovenly service?

But this isn’t the sort of food criticism I mean. We’re talking big-time litigation here, with millions at stake, and I don’t just mean the hourly rates of the lawyers involved. Hard as it is to believe, since 1994 it has become illegal to disparage food in 13 of our 50 states. This is because some farmers and ranchers convinced 13 legislatures that they could be injured if irresponsible commentators made loathsome remarks about the food they produced, suggesting it was unsafe or even yucky.

These “food disparagement laws” sounded too ludicrous at first to be taken seriously. I mean, does a pound of lard, a well-marbled steak, a pesticidetreated fruit, a rotten tomato have a measure of statutory protection we don’t apply to rock stars or presidents? Must we now be able to prove it if we write in a newspaper that rancid grease is disgusting and raw liver makes us nauseous? Apparently. Oprah Winfrey and her handlers are having their pants sued off by some ranchers under the Texas food disparagement law. It’s because she disparaged hamburgers on a show about mad cow disease by saying “it just stopped me cold from eating another burger.” Carrot sticks for her.

But the ranchers claimed her comments harmed the hell out of them and caused beef prices to go down. Another suit has been filed by - I’m not making this up - some Texas emu producers who claimed to have been wounded by a Honda ad that spoofed emu meat as the “pork of the future.”

If you have freely chosen to be an emu rancher in a state such as Texas, where men are men and real ones don’t eat strange foreign birds, you’d think these bird boys would have developed a thicker skin. Haven’t they been taunted by the same joke at the local saloon?

The next time I go out to eat and try to send back some high-priced slop that tastes a week old, am I going to be told by some officious waiter that it’s “not a good idea, sir. We have laws to deal with people like you.”

Look, I sympathize with some poor farmer who gets stuck with an orchard full of overripe fruit he can’t sell because some health food nut went on TV and claimed the farmer sprayed it with something unappetizing.

But if we can’t yell about food, how long will it be before Rudy Giuliani hits us with a mayordisparagement law?

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