Why is San Francisco doing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s work for him? The liberal city’s lawsuit against major food makers, announced last week, sounds like it could have been written by the Health and Human Services secretary himself.
The city, which tried to force soda makers to include cigarette-style health warnings in advertising, is now saying that food companies “engineered a public health crisis, they profited handsomely, and now they need to take responsibility for the harm they have caused.” Compare that to Kennedy’s claim in 2024 that “we are literally poisoning our children, systematically, for profit” with ultra-processed foods.
It is true, of course, that some foods are bad for you. Serious research has linked ultra-processed foods to bad health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and cognitive disorders such as dementia.
But Kennedy and San Francisco go far beyond any scientific evidence in their claims that food companies have intentionally poisoned their customers and lied about it. They argue that the companies knowingly make their products addictive and seek to engineer greater addictiveness as their method of making money. Yet scientists have not reached any consensus on whether these foods are addictive in the first place, a topic that has been fiercely debated for years.
Courts require rock-solid evidence, however, that the specific products in question caused a person harm, which is why a similar lawsuit in Pennsylvania was dismissed earlier this year. The law firm that brought the case, Morgan & Morgan — founded by Democratic megadonor John Morgan — is among those representing San Francisco. One thing is certain: A successful suit against food companies for a vaguely defined suite of public health problems would be a money-printing machine for trial lawyers like Morgan & Morgan and (in his recent life) Kennedy.
Another problem with the case against ultra-processed foods is that there is no agreed-upon definition of an ultra-processed food. San Francisco’s lawsuit and the Trump administration’s MAHA report both say the term describes 70 percent of America’s food supply, far too expansive to be a meaningful definition.
Clean distinctions based on packaging don’t work. There are both healthy and unhealthy canned and frozen foods, for example. Ingredient counts aren’t reliable indicators of nutrition. Potato chips generally consist of just three components: potatoes, vegetable oil and salt. Many preservatives are widely considered to be safe, and prohibiting them would result in needless food waste.
For consumers who wish to avoid more heavily processed foods with artificial ingredients, a $72 billion organic food industry in the U.S. is waiting to serve them. It has been growing faster than the overall food industry, indicating that consumers are capable of availing themselves of this choice.
It’s not surprising that Bay Area progressives and Kennedy share so many views. Kennedy was a Democrat and California resident until recently. He was the kind of guy who used to be invited to give “distinguished lectures” at the University of California, Berkeley. The bad habit of policing other people’s choices is tough to shake.
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