Time once was that folks who brought lawsuits involving food actually had something serious to complain about. Often these were cases when foreign objects were found in food -- the stone in a can of beans, the chunk of beef bone in a hamburger, or the sharp sliver of chicken bone found in a tostado (which led one judge to refer to the "chicken bone law," because of the seemingly irrational distinction the courts were making between beef bones in hamburgers and chicken bones in tostados). These weren't, and aren't, pleasant cases to read, but the people who brought the lawsuits (who often had suffered serious injuries) had a good reason to do so.
But in the last decade or two, more and more food lawsuits are so fundamentally wrongheaded that many of them can only be labeled as "stupid food lawsuits." "Stupid," in those cases, referring not to the food, but to the people who bring the lawsuits.
There was the fellow who sued an amusement park because he wasn't allowed more than a few free refills of his gigantic cup of soda every hour. Or the fellow who sued Anheuser-Busch because, despite what its ads showed, drinking beer doesn't magically turn your life into endless tropical settings populated by beautiful women.
Or the woman who sued the makers of Cap'n Crunch cereal because its "crunchberry" version didn't contain real fruit -- possibly because there is no such fruit as "crunchberries." Or, as covered here just a few months ago, the Miami woman who sued Kraft Heinz because, despite what its microwave macaroni and cheese packaging said, it actually takes a few seconds more than 3½ minutes to prepare the product.
Jesus wept.
Anyway, back in 2017, in the spirit of the crunchberry lawsuit, a woman named Jessica Gomez sued the Jelly Belly company because she had discovered to her horror that jelly beans contain sugar. Or, more specifically, as her attorneys explained in the lawsuit (yes, she found a law firm to represent her), Jelly Belly sold a product called "Sport Beans." And it contained sugar.
As explained in Ms. Gomez' lawsuit, the name implied that the product was "a sports performance aid," and Jelly Belly (whose own name, by the way, does not exactly conjure up images of iron-hard abdominal muscles) listed "evaporated cane juice" as the primary ingredient in its product. "Sugar," however, was not found in the ingredient list on the product. Nor, according to the lawsuit, did Jelly Belly explain that "evaporated cane juice" is not juice but instead, "by its common and usual name" is sugar.
Which is not entirely true. "Evaporated cane juice," although primarily sugar, is a slightly more nutritious product, intermediate between raw sugar cane juice and white table sugar. It's brown in color, and not as refined.
Sort of like, oh, like . . . like how raw opium isn't as refined as morphine. Or heroin.
(Curiously, these days Jelly Belly now lists "cane sugar" as their main ingredient in "Sport Beans," followed by "tapioca syrup," which is also another "natural alternative sweetener" that nevertheless is mostly sugar.)
Well, perhaps a bit more troublesome for her "legal theory" is that the rest of the label doesn't exactly hide what "Sport Beans" contain. ("Sport Beans" contains? "Sport Bean" contains? . . . never mind.) It's similar to a lot of other health-adjacent edible food-like substances that tout how they provide "quick energy," are "fortified" with vitamins, and have a variety of other trace ingredients, such as various minerals.
But they sure look like Jelly Belly's regular product, i.e., jelly beans. And the label did acknowledge (as required by law) that the product contains 17 grams of sugar per serving.
Really -- if you're going to complain about the "misleading labeling," maybe you might want to begin by . . . reading the whole label?
Unsurprisingly, it didn't take Jelly Belly, or the San Bernardino County court in California where the lawsuit was filed, to dispose of Ms. Gomez' complaints. Jelly Belly asked the court to dismiss the case, and after briefly giving her and her counsel an opportunity to try to amend what the judge saw as a gaping hole in the lawsuit (namely, that she didn't actually allege any injury to herself), the court dismissed the case entirely a few months after it was filed.
And she chose not to appeal. Which is a pity, because it deprived us of yet another appellate decision ridiculing the kinds of cases that get filed these days.
Frank Zotter, Jr. is a Ukiah attorney.
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