Proposed changes would extend and strengthen Florida’s “veggie libel” law
Just as the movement for making America healthy again is starting to make progress, the food industry is fighting back. A bill currently in the Florida legislature would strengthen the state’s existing agricultural disparagement law to apply to any food product produced in the state—including sugar.
Food disparagement laws, also known as “veggie libel” laws, date back to 1989. After CBS’s 60 Minutes aired an episode highlighting the carcinogenicity of Alar—a chemical used on apples—apple growers lost nearly $100 million dollars in sales. The moral should have been to stop spraying toxic chemicals on food. Instead, they sued CBS—and lost because they couldn’t prove that Alar was safe. But the idea of using litigation to protect chemical-dependent agriculture continued.
During the 1990s, 13 states passed food disparagement laws. Beef producers invoked the Texas statute to sue Oprah Winfrey in 1996, after a guest on her television show explained that it was common beef industry practice to feed dead cattle to cattle. That “has just stopped me cold from eating another burger,” Oprah replied in horror. She won the lawsuit, but at a steep price—somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million in legal fees. The end result was exactly what the beef lobby intended—a “chilling effect” that made many people avoid criticizing the food industry for fear of being sued.
Florida’s existing food libel law, which was originally passed in 1994 and has never been invoked, allows “agricultural producers to recover damages for the disparagement of any perishable agricultural food product.” The 2026 Florida Farm Bill, currently under consideration by both Florida’s Senate and House of Representatives, strikes the word “perishable” from this statute and broadens the definition of “agricultural food product” to include “any agricultural practices used in the production of such products.”
Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, who drafted the bill, tried to slip these changes in unnoticed. He told reporters that “his goal is to ensure that sugar growers can use Florida’s food libel, too.”
Simpson did not give details about how sugar growers or processers intend to use the food libel law. Environmental groups fear that they could use it to silence groups who protest water pollution or toxic soot from pre-harvest fires in sugarcane production. No one has discussed how it could impact the growing movement for Americans to drastically reduce sugar consumption, endorsed by the USDA’s new dietary guidelines.
Fortunately for free speech, news of the provision got out before the Senate hearings on January 27. After receiving over 9,000 negative comments, the hearing was postponed for another week. So there’s still time for eco-ag advocates to contact Florida senators and request that they not only cut the proposed changes, but completely eliminate the existing food libel law (Section 48 of the Florida Farm Bill).
If that happens, maybe we can reduce the number of states with food disparagement laws from 13 to 12.
