let's talk about… hmm... frivolous lawsuits.
Alright where do we start? Let's start
with Lean Cuisine. This particular
version says on here “no preservatives.”
Now there was a lawsuit, a class-action
lawsuit, launched against the company. Why?
Because this product contains citric acid
and the lawsuit maintains that
citric acid is a preservative and
therefore customers were fooled because
of the no preservatives label. Well there
are several layers of nonsense here.
First of all, I don't quite understand
why anyone would want something with no
preservatives. You want your food spoiled, rather?
And the reason companies use
preservatives is to provide a safer food supply.
But that's not the point here.
Citric acid is not put into this product
as a preservative. It's a frozen meal. You
do not need any other preservative.
Freezing preserves the food. Citric acid
is used to impart a slight tart flavour.
But because the Food and Drug
Administration in the U.S. lists citric
acid as a possible preservative,
therefore the class-action lawsuit says
that this is mislabeled. Of course no one
would have been damaged by this
mislabeling, but it's, I think an effort to
try to get an out-of-court settlement
and because it pays, you know, it costs
too much to pay for lawyers to try to
defend this kind of silliness. Alright,
what else is there in terms of frivolous
lawsuits? How about this one… We go to
California for this. What's the problem here?
You see the label “all-natural.” Well it
turns out that this also contains citric
acid and this time it's a different
argument that the class-action lawsuit
should not be labeled as natural. What’s
the story here? Well citric acid, of
course, can be extracted from lemons,
limes, oranges. It occurs naturally. But
citric acid can also be made. How? Well
there’s a fungus called Aspergillus niger
and you feed it some sugar and it will
crank out citric acid.
Now the citric acid that is produced in
that way is identical to the citric acid
that can be isolated from a lemon, so
citric acid is citric acid. It doesn't
matter how it was made. Whether it was
made by mother nature in a lemon or by
mother nature in a fungus. This is all
the same thing, but according to the
lawsuit
there has been some treachery here
because it is labeled “all-natural”
whereas the citric acid may have come
from a version, from a synthetic version.
Not that it matters at all, but they
claim that people have been misled by
this. They even make the argument that
the “all-natural” is mislabeled because
the sugar that is fed to the fungus that
makes the citric acid may have come from
genetically modified corn and therefore
this is not natural. Well what is not
natural is the plethora of this kind of
silly lawsuits. Lawyers are making a
killing off of it, what we really need
here is some education. People need to
realize that the term natural has no
legal definition and that the citric
acid that comes from a lemon is the same
as a citric acid that is made in any
other way. Perhaps what we need is a class-action lawsuit against the people
class-action lawsuit against the people
who are carrying out these silly class-action lawsuits.