Court Opinion

ID: 9854432
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 06:07:34.120451+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:23:04.730395
License: Public Domain

Hill, J.
(concurring specially)—I would agree that the trial court should have enjoined the respondents from marketing their product in the cartons referred to in the majority opinion, because they might tend to mislead and deceive a consumer into believing that he was purchasing milk.
However, I see no necessity to haul out all the heavy constitutional artillery to hit and demolish a misleading and deceptive carton. This is apparently an effort by the State Department of Agriculture to refight the margarine battle on a different front. Today the consumer who wants butter buys butter; and the consumer who desires margarine buys margarine. The fact that there is a “semblance” between margarine and butter is quite immaterial since it *658deceives no one. The evil is “deception,” not “semblance”; and the remedy is proper labeling,1 not prohibition.
It should require no constitutional argument to establish the right of the respondents to produce and sell a product that is harmless, nutritious and wholesome. That the product in question has the “color of milk, has the general viscosity of milk, and to some tastes and smells like milk” has no bearing on the right to produce it and sell it, unless the consumer is deceived thereby.
However, where, as in the present case, there is a “semblance” to milk, and the product is sold by “Reesman’s Dairy” and is designated as “Farmer’s Daughter,” the “semblance” can well become deceptive. The state, to make sure that the consumer knows he is not getting milk, might well require the statement “Not to be sold as milk” on the front and back of the carton, and enjoin the sale unless so marked.
My concurrence is on very narrow grounds, and my disagreement with the majority certainly extends to any acceptance of the idea that the legislature has the same power as Humpty Dumpty—in Alice in Wonderland—to make any word mean “just what I choose it to mean— neither more nor less.” (I refer to the contention that the product here in question was “adulterated.”)

A recognized trade name of “Carolene” seems to have solved the deception problem in several states including Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and Nebraska. See State ex rel. McKittrick v. Carolene Prods. Co., 346 Mo. 1049, 144 S.W.2d 153 (1940); Carolene Prods. Co. v. McLaughlin, 365 Ill. 62, 5 N.E.2d 447 (1936); Carolene Prods. Co. v. Thomson, 276 Mich. 172, 267 N.W. 608 (1936); Carolene Prods. Co. v. Banning, 131 Neb. 429, 268 N.W. 313 (1936).
These cases all dealt with the same product which was packaged in tins and labeled “Not to be Sold for Evaporated Milk.” In each case the “filled milk” act was held to deny due process of law because it prohibited the sale of any milk to which any fat or oil other than milk fat had been added, regardless of the wholesomeness or nutritional value of the product.
None of these acts, however, contained the wording “in imitation or semblance of any dairy product,” as does the Washington Pilled Dairy Products Act. See also, Constitutionality of Regulations as to Milk, Annot., 155A.L.R. 1383, 1406-12 (1945).