Food, glorious food

Let’s see, it’s been a while since I’ve checked in with Overlawyered, those invaluable documentarians of a legal system gone crazy. What’s on the menu?

Item 1: I guess they don’t sell Grape-Nuts in Britain. “A spicy sausage known as the Welsh Dragon will have to be renamed after trading standards’ officers warned the manufacturers that they could face prosecution because it does not contain dragon. The sausages will now have to be labelled Welsh Dragon Pork Sausages to avoid any confusion among customers.”

Item 2: Do not play practical jokes on minorities. “A black firefighter who was served dog food in his spaghetti by fellow firefighters will be paid more than $2.7 million to settle a lawsuit alleging racial harassment within the Los Angeles Fire Department.” Why? Because this wasn’t just a bunch of firemen playing a joke on one of their colleagues. It was an episode loaded with historic resonance.

Yes indeed. Somehow the firefighter, in suing his colleagues, found an academic to say that this little stunt was the equivalent of putting a burning cross in his plate of spaghetti. “The association of a black man and dog food resonates with the deep historical roots of slavery and the corresponding dehumanization,” said sociologist David Wellman, co-author of Whitewashing Race: Colorblind Policies in a Color Conscious America.”

As Andrew Kantor notes, however, dog food didn’t exist until the 1940s, so the connection between Alpo and slavery is murky at best. You’d think the defendant’s lawyer might have looked into that before settling for millions of dollars.

Item 3: Craziest legal compaint ever. New York activists are trying their damndest to ban foie gras, because the production of it involves force-feeding geese. The legal approach they are taking this time is that because the geese grow unnaturally fat, they should qualified as diseased, and since it is illegal to sell the products of diseased animals… QED! Close down the industry! (And every turkey and chicken farm in America, while you’re at it.)

That’s crazy, but it’s not the craziest legal complaint ever. That comes later in the New York Sun article:

The first challenge the suit faces is to convince a judge that the animal-rights activists who filed the suit have suffered enough harm to allow them standing to sue. The plaintiffs in yesterday’s suit offered several ways that they had been harmed by the foie gras industry.

One plaintiff, Caroline Lee, claims that the state’s regulatory departments are misspending her tax dollars by inspecting birds raised for foie gras production without concluding they are diseased. Another plaintiff, an animal rescue organization, Farm Sanctuary, claims its employees have been “aesthetically and emotionally injured” by being exposed to the “suffering” of abandoned ducks that they rescue from foie gras production. Another plaintiff, a New York restaurateur, Joy Pierson, claims that her decision not to serve foie gras has caused her to lose customers at her two Manhattan restaurants, Candle 79 and Candle Café, according to the complaint.

I love Joy Pierson’s argument. I could read that sentence for the rest of the day. “I don’t want to serve foie gras, but others do, and therefore I am losing customers and should be compensated. Closing down the entire foie gras industry would be a good first step.”

Personally, I plan on opening up a toy store, but I am not going to sell Legos, a perfectly legal product, because I don’t like the Danish. Then I’m going to try to make Legos illegal, because my decision not to sell the toy is costing me business. It only stands to reason!