You may have noted my post yesterday on the lawsuit filed in California to prevent toys being used to entice young children to bay for a particular fast-food meal. I'm against marketing of unhealthy food to kids too young to distinguish between reality and advertising puffery, so I'm for the suit.

Here's how a monied special-interest group pimping for the restaurant and food-products industry framed the suit (no link provided, intentionally): 

"In typical food police fashion, these anti-consumer activists are calling for the obliteration of parental authority and less choice in the marketplace."

To these people, the key issues are "the obliteration of parental authority" and "less choice in the marketplace." It's impressive, if impressively contorted.

The former implies that parents should be the only decider on whether their kid should buy a meal sold with something extra. If parental authority is the only, or chief, issue, then companies that want to sell, say, toys laced with lead or arsenic should be allowed to. If some other entity — the "health police," presumably — intercedes, it will signal "the obliteration of parental authority."

Laid bare, this is patently stupid, of course. And, the analogy is not inapt, although the threat to public health in this case isn't the toy but the meal the toy is deployed to sell. If the merits of the meal sold it, they wouldn't need junky trinkets to do it, would they? But the world would laugh if fast-foodies sold their products solely on quality. Would you not laugh?

Meanwhile, the latter half of the argument is just as daft: If restaurants can't use toys to entice preschoolers, the marketplace will suffer from one less option. Oh, the horror.

The charming folks behind the site, myfoodmychoice, are cut from the same cloth as the ones behind the "Center for Consumer Freedom," which shouts its disregard of truth by its very name — it proclaims "consumer freedom" when it really wants to protect manufacturer freedom to sell whatever will bring the most profit, regardless of the effects on public health.

In a suit that raises questions of child health, do we really want to start, and end, with how a practice affects consumer choice? Is that really the highest value? To these folks, it evidently is. They prove it more so with every missive.