fructoseCross-posted at WLF’s Forbes.com contributor site

When some future legal scholar writes the history of how the public health activist-plaintiffs’ bar-government regulator axis of paternalism tried to use litigation to alter America’s food choices, S.F. v. Archer Daniels Midland et al. may not even merit a mention. But for now, it stands as the most notorious illustration of how a baseless lawsuit can effectively demonize one disfavored food ingredient.

The Complaint. S.F. is the mother of S.E.F., a fourteen-year old who suffers from Type 2 diabetes. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and the other three defendants (Cargill, Ingredion Inc., and Tate & Lyle Ingredients Americas) make up the entire corn refiners industry. They refine corn into, among other things, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a food ingredient public health activists have long vilified. In her complaint, S.F. rattled off inflammatory allegation after another, including such unsubstantiated charges as “HFCS is a toxin.” She eventually got around to asserting that HFCS is “unreasonably dangerous” and caused her daughter’s diabetes. She demanded $5 million in damages.

The suit achieved its immediate, and perhaps only, goal of garnering sympathetic media attention. Most reports parroted the plaintiff’s outlandish statements and quoted professional food activists who are attacking HFCS in others venues, such as before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Of course only scant reporting has been done on the suit since, with just a few stories in the trade press about the defendants’ motions to dismiss, documents which have effectively exposed the suit as legally and factually baseless.

Undeniable Legal Flaws. The legal flaws in the plaintiff’s case, detailed in the defendants’ initial motion to dismiss and their November 1 reply memo, are abundant and clear, so we’ll only briefly summarize them here: