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Critics of the new laws, who once chuckled over them, are now worried that they chill warnings about food safety. "The statutes at first were regarded as quirky and weird, but they are an area where First Amendment rights are bumping up against commercial interests," says Emory University law professor David Bederman, who tried unsuccessfully to challenge Georgia's food-disparagement law. If such laws had existed in the 1960s, environmentalists say, people would have been afraid to criticize the pesticide DDT, which was considered safe until it was proved to cause cancer and then banned in the U.S. "Going back to Upton Sinclair and The Jungle, a free and open discourse about food safety has been critical," says Lawrie Mott, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council and one of the authors of the Alar report. "With each of the major debates, we have seen reforms emerge."
The days when spinach, liver and other unpopular foods could be mocked with impunity may be past. Not surprisingly, other aggrieved vegetable and meat producers are lining up to sue. The nation's second food-disparagement suit, also to be tried in Amarillo, pits emu farmers against the Honda car company. The farmers say the emu was slammed by a commercial featuring a hucksterish emu rancher who promotes the ostrich-like bird as "the pork of the future." The ad never calls emu meat unsafe, but Fort Worth attorney John Scott says its portrayal of the birds as disreputable has dealt his clients a hard blow. In these litigious times, insult an ugly, flightless, 6-ft.-tall bird, and you may have to answer for yourself in court.