On June 19, a British judge ruled that two environmental activists had committed "McLibel" when they criticized the McDonald's restaurant chain for serving fatty, unhealthy foods, damaging the environment, paying low wages and mistreating animals.
Although Justice Rodger Bell acknowledged that there was a factual basis for all of these criticisms, under Britain's reactionary libel law he ruled that activists Helen Steel and Dave Morris were guilty anyway and ordered them to pay $96,000 in damages.
In the United States, meanwhile, the food industry is working overtime to enact British-style libel laws that make it easier to silence American activists and journalists. The first target of such a lawsuit in the U.S., ironically enough, is Howard Lyman of the Humane Society of the U.S., who is being sued along with Oprah Winfrey for warning on the Oprah Show about the human dangers associated with England's epidemic of mad cow disease.
The United States legal system has historically placed a high value on freedom of speech. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
New "agricultural product disparagement laws," however, are being placed on the books precisely for the purpose of "abridging freedom of speech." The new laws give the food industry unprecedented powers to sue people who criticize their products, using standards of evidence which dramatically shift the "burden of proof" in favor of the industry. "In them, American agribusiness has its mightiest tool yet against food-safety activists and environmentalists, whose campaigns can cost industry millions if they affect consumers' buying habits," observes Village Voice reporter Thomas Goetz.
The lawsuit against Howard Lyman, filed in 1996 by cattleman Paul Engler, states that Lyman's warning about mad cow disease "goes beyond all possible bounds of decency and is utterly intolerable in a civilized community." Apparently England is the type of intolerant "civilized community" that Engler would like to emulate.
| If the meat industry has its way, your information about food safety issues will be limited to self-serving propaganda like this ad by the American Meat Institute. | |  |
The lawsuit marks the first test case for a new legal standard which the agriculture industry has spent the past half-decade introducing into dozens of U.S. states. "All agricultural eyes will be watching this one," observed one food industry lobbyist. Engler's attorney described the suit as "a historic case; it serves as a real bellwether. It should make reporters and journalists and entertainers--and whatever Oprah considers herself--more careful."
Thirteen states to date have enacted "food disparagement" laws. Under previous laws, the food industry bore the burden of proof. In order to win a libel case, it had to prove that its critics were deliberately and knowingly circulating false information.
Under the new laws, however, it doesn't matter that Lyman believes in his statements, or even that he can produce scientists who will support him. The industry will be able to convict him of spreading "false information" if it can convince a jury that his statements on the Oprah show deviated from "reasonable and reliable scientific inquiry, facts, or data"--a legal standard which gives a clear advantage to the multi-billion-dollar beef industry, particularly in Texas cattle country --and particularly with respect to mad cow disease, an exotic illness whose characteristics continue to baffle researchers.
Stranger than Fiction
The Oprah show aired on April 16, 1996, less than a month after the British government reversed a decade of denial and admitted that consumption of beef from mad cows was the "most likely" explanation for the appearance of a bizarre, previously unseen dementia in humans known as "new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease." Like conventional strains of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the new variant strain is incurable and invariably fatal, killing its victims by filling their brains with microscopic spongy holes. Conventional CJD, however, almost always kills older people--usually after the age of 50. The new variant came to light when young people started dying, some of them still in their teens.
To date, 19 cases of the new disease have been documented in humans. The number so far is small, and it is possible that it will stay small, but it is by no means certain. Lyman's statement on the Oprah Show included his opinion that mad cow disease could be worse than AIDS--an opinion which he bases on the fact that both diseases can take years, even decades, to incubate, thereby making it impossible to predict the size of an outbreak during its early stages.
This parallel has also been noted by Luc Montagnier, the French scientist who first discovered the infectious agent that causes AIDS. At the time of his discovery in 1983, France had only seen a total of 200 AIDS cases. "I did not realize the epidemic could spread so fast and so widely in the world," he said, warning that the handful of early human victims from mad cow disease could be the harbinger of a much larger epidemic. "It is very difficult to predict, as it was for HIV in 1983," he said.
Mad cow disease belongs to a class of spongy brain diseases known as "transmissible spongiform encephalopathies" TSEs which can take even longer to incubate than AIDS. In Papua New Guinea, an epidemic of a human TSE called kuru included cases in which more than 40 years passed between the time of infection and the onset of illness.
No TSE had ever been documented in cows until the mid-1980s, and the total number of bovine cases did not crack 1,000 until the year 1988. Since then, however, more than 160,000 cases have been documented, and scientists concur that most were infected during the period when the British government was confidently claiming that "the number of confirmed cases . . . is very small."
"In those days, it really was hard, in fact, nobody honestly could foresee what was going to happen," British researcher Richard Kimberlin said in 1996. "Now it is all painfully clear, the sheer scale of the epidemic."
Amid the many mysteries surrounding the disease, however, one fact has emerged undisputed. The disease in cows became an epidemic because of modern farming practices, in particular the practice of feeding protein derived from rendered cattle back to other cows. Howard Lyman's appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show focused heavily on precisely this practice of "cow cannibalism." He is being sued because he correctly told a national audience that the U.S. meat industry is continuing to practice animal cannibalism on a massive scale.
Following the first human deaths in England, the USDA and the cattle industry have reluctantly accepted a limited ban on feeding cattle remains back to cows. In order to minimize the blow to industry, however, loopholes have been written into the legislation. It remains legal to feed cattle remains to pigs or chickens, and those remains can in turn be rendered and fed back to cattle. In addition, cannibalistic feeding of pigs to pigs and chickens to chickens remains a common practice which is fully legal under the new regulation.
These are the sort of practices that Lyman warned against, and which drew outraged reactions of shock and surprise from Oprah Winfrey and her studio audience. Government and industry insist that their limited regulations are adequate to prevent future TSE outbreaks in the livestock industry, but not everyone agrees.
A public debate over these practices would undoubtedly alarm U.S. consumers. The U.S. food industry is anxious to avoid such a debate, which is why it has taken extraordinary steps to silence Howard Lyman.
