Fat Chance

It's all about you. Your mid-afternoon candy bars. Your wallowing in all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets like a pig in mud. Your inability to just say no to that supersized French Fries, that Massive Gulp of soda, that waste paper basket full of popcorn at the gigaplex.

The personal responsibility movement, which has brought us such lumps of coal as abstinence pacts and zero tolerance of drugs even for medical purposes, is now attacking the food we eat. Correction: attacking us for the food we eat. And the worst part is, they want to take away our ability to fight back. The "Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act of 2003" informally known as the "cheeseburger bill" -- passed the House in early March and is now set to stir up debate in the Senate later this spring. The bill attempts to ban all lawsuits that link the food industry to obesity or obesity-related diseases such as diabetes. Following Capitol Hill's lead, 24 states, including Arizona as of last week, have introduced bills during the 2004 session that would similarly shield the food industry from personal-injury lawsuits.

Ever since a group of obese teenagers went after McDonalds in court in 2002 for not disclosing the health consequences of successive Big Mac attacks, Big Food is running scared that the overweight will take a cue from smokers who successfully went after Big Tobacco.

The myth of the frivolous lawsuit

The food industry is only the most recent convert to tort reform -- the campaign to limit payouts on personal liability claims claims that was central to Newt Gingrich's Contract with America in 1994. Though Americans are notoriously litigious, the plague of lawsuits is largely a myth. In 1986, Ronald Reagan told an anecdote about a drunk driver plowing into a telephone booth and the unlucky caller suing. . . the telephone company! What Reagan failed to mention was that the caller tried to get out of the booth to avoid the onrushing car but the door didn't work properly -- an entirely appropriate lawsuit. As Duke University law professor Neil Vidmar persuasively argued in a 1999 essay, "The data bearing on jury trial verdicts, settlement, and frivolous litigation strongly suggest that the traditional tort system is in fact relatively effective in screening out nonmeritorious cases." And yet, tort reform, like a bad case of food poisoning, stays with us, and the "cheeseburger bill" is the latest reminder.

Let's for the moment forget knee-jerk libertarianism and its "get your dirty laws off my paunch" battle cry. Obesity is a problem, if not for you then at least for an ever increasing number of ever-increasing Americans. Two-thirds of the population are overweight, and half of those are obese. The Journal of International Obesity warns of an "epidemic." It's a problem particularly among children, the less affluent, new immigrants, and women of color. The costs are staggering: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate America's annual price tag for obesity at $117 billion. And it's not just America. In 2000, to underscore the growing global divide of haves and have nots, the number of overweight finally matched that of the undernourished at 1.1 billion each.

No panaceas

Few dispute these conclusions (aside from "big is beautiful" enthusiasts). Yet there is little consensus about how to deal with the problem. The personal responsibility movement and conservative front organizations such as the Consumer Freedom Council focus on the demand side of the equation. People should simply eat less and exercise more. Yes, and when we've accomplished these tasks, we should just be nice to each other, stop haggling over meaningless national borders and refrain from taking so many cross-country trips in our SUVs. Thus, in a thrice, we would solve murder, war and global warming without ever having to control firearms, regulate the arms trade, or restrict global carbon dioxide emissions.