San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu announced a lawsuit this week against mega food manufacturers for “unfair and deceptive acts” in marketing and selling their ultra-processed foods. The legal action, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, argues that the companies know their products are harming consumers but sell them anyway. Between the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and the progressive left, there seems to be little wiggle room for potato chips and frozen dinners to stay in grocery stores as is.
According to Chiu, ultra-processed foods make up 70% of our food supply and are impossible to avoid. Yet research has shown that these very same foodstuffs may be harming consumers. Multiple studies over many years have demonstrated a connection between obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and more with the consumption of these types of foods.
Ultra-processed Food – What Is It?
So what exactly qualifies as an ultra-processed food (UPF)? That’s actually a gray area. Everyone appears to have their own definition. Some say UPFs are high in sugar, fat, and additives. Others claim they are foods with limited nutritional value, loaded with chemical additives. One definition from the New York Post seems particularly explanatory: “As a general guideline, if something comes in a bag or a box and has a shelf life measured in years, it’s more than likely a UPF.”
Everyone seems to agree that snacks like Cheetos and Pringles are UPFs, but damning all prepared foods as ultra-processed leaves very little on the store shelves. Vani Hari, also known as The Food Babe, told Fox News this action against UPFs is long overdue:
“When a major US city sues big food, that's not politics anymore. That's a turning point in American history. This is a moment we've been waiting for to stop normalizing toxic ingredients and start protecting families. MAHA let the beast out of the bag. They unleashed decades of burying the truth about how our food is engineered to be addictive. This isn't just a lawsuit. It's a big wake-up call for big food that they can no longer hide.”
There’s no getting around the scientific research that concludes ultra-processed foods are anathema to the human body. A three-part study in the UK-based medical journal The Lancet concluded that “Deteriorating diets are an urgent public health threat,” and “This rise in ultra-processed foods is driven by powerful global corporations who employ sophisticated political tactics to protect and maximise profits.” Ms. Hari doubles down on this point, claiming:
“How do we stand a chance when a company like PepsiCo is literally using a robot that mimics human taste buds to make sure that you crave their product before you even have the first bite? When machines determine what we crave, it's not food anymore. It's manipulation. How Cheetos are engineered to melt away in your mouth so your brain doesn't think you're eating anything, and you can't register the calories. They call this vanishing caloric density. Doritos and other snacks are laced with M-S-G that's given to rats in obesity studies to make them fat. The fact is that the food companies continue to use these tactics that they learned from the tobacco industry on how to hijack our brains so that we cannot stop eating. We can't stand a chance against that type of manipulation, and that's why big food needs to be held accountable, and they need to stop that right now.”
San Francisco has a track record of taking on manufacturers of lead paint and tobacco and winning tens of millions in litigation, so it’s not pie-in-the-sky to think they have a chance of holding major companies accountable for their UPFs.
UPFs Make Strange Political Bedfellows
There’s no getting around the fact that San Francisco’s political left sounds a lot like the Trump Administration's Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The city attorney who brought the lawsuits forward even admitted as much when announcing the legal action: “Many of the perspectives of this administration are not backed by science, but this is different. Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” Mr. Chiu quipped.
Defendants include Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz Company, General Mills, Nestle USA, and Kellogg's, among others.
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