Center for Consumer Freedom - Part 2

December 09, 2009 ↓ Comments (0)

According to their website, the Center for Consumer Freedom is a nonprofit coalition of restaurants, food companies, and consumers working together to promote personal responsibility and protect consumer choices*. Their “Funny Lawyer Commercials” attack hypothetical situations in order to make a mockery of anyone who thinks High Fructose Corn Syrup isn’t okay for us to eat (in moderation).

Take a closer look at the judge in the commercial. He’s Rick Berman, the man behind the Center for Consumer Freedom and owner of the lobbying and consulting firm it employs. I wonder if he cast himself for the fun of it or if he’s trying to say something about who is making the decisions in this case. Let’s be real, the defense is not a girl scout. It’s Kellogs, Keebler, Interbake Food, and George Weston Limited—the companies that baked Girl Scout cookies in 2008—and companies like them who want the contracts in the future.

What if Girl Scouts changed gears and sold gardening seeds? What if they sold information? What if they sold anything but cookies? Cookies are old fashioned, sexist even. People are catching on. GS Cookies are crap food. Why not make your own Girl Scout Cookies at home? Because you’ll let down that little girl in your life. What a racket!

“Learn more about who is cashing in on obesity at Consumer Freedom dot com.”

Wait. Aren’t food companies cashing in on obesity? I don’t doubt that some people—lawyers and individuals alike—want to make a buck off of large corporations. It’s been happening for years. Recently a Florida woman sued tobacco companies and won millions of dollars in damages for her emphysema caused by smoking. Imagine that. Are the Consumer Freedom people worried that lawyers and the people that fund them are going to start suing the food industry for feeding people High Fructose Corn Syrup for all these years, even though they knew it wasn’t good for us?

The above mentioned tobacco lawsuit happened in 2009. Cigarettes now have warning labels and you’d have to be living on Mars your whole life to not know smoking is bad for you. Imagine if cigarette companies ran ads that claimed smoking was equally as bad as walking on the sidewalk of a busy city street or that having a cigarette once in a while was as dangerous for your lungs as watching fireworks on 4th of July. Everyone knows smoking should only be done in moderation. Soon the “smoke police” will ban smoking from restaurants in an unAmerican attempt to limit our freedoms. Then they’ll ban tobacco companies from advertising on television. Laws might even get passed to prevent kids from smoking. That’s crazy! It’s a parent’s responsibility to monitor their kids.

Sorry, I’m digressing from the topic. My point is that I’d love to see someone (from the Center for Consumer Freedom or sugarscam.com) live on HFCS for a month like Morgan Spurlock did in his Supersize Me documentary. Everyone knows McDonald’s is not good for us and none of us would attempt to live off it, but we all wondered what would happen it we did. Morgan put it to the test. Still, there are plenty of people out there who do live on junk food but hopefully the tides are shifting.

The Internet is getting information out to people. It’s changing things. We can easily research issues and communicate with each other. If you like sugar and how it makes you feel, keep eating it. For the rest of us, we can stop eating it. Because, no matter who tells me what, I don’t need a doctor or scientist to let me know that sugar always makes me feel lousy.

* Taken from the description in their website’s meta tag.