As a thoughtful follow-up to last month’s obesity-related lawsuit, today’s issue of USA Today includes an essay by Rick Berman, executive director and co-founder of the Center for Consumer Freedom. Berman makes the case that “the legal assault on ‘Big Fat’ is silly on its face,” and argues that the current societal desire to punish fast-food chains is based on statistics that the New England Journal of Medicine has called “limited, fragmented, and often ambiguous” — not to mention “derived from weak or incomplete data.”
Even those commentators who embrace lunatic ideas like applying “Twinkie taxes” to fatty foods or declaring the airways off-limits to fast-food advertising, are beginning to question the wisdom of encouraging obese Americans to blame restaurants for their own food choices. On Tuesday, an associate editor at The State (the paper of record in Columbia, SC) wrote that it’s absurd to suggest that “the people who eat too much are not responsible for their own choices.”
