United States v. 8 Cartons, More or Less, Molasses, Etc.
primary document · 1951
LINK
SUMMARY
Federal district court opinion (W.D.N.Y., Docket No. 4813, Judge Burke, decided 14 April 1951), located via the CourtListener search API and read via a proxy fetch of the CourtListener opinion page (a direct automated fetch of courtlistener.com returns HTTP 202 with an empty body, so no verbatim text from this opinion is quoted in the bundle; facts are paraphrased only). Facts: the U.S. Marshal seized 'Plantation' blackstrap molasses (packed by Allied Molasses Co., Inc.) and copies of Gayelord Hauser's book Look Younger, Live Longer on 6 March 1951 at the Rochester Natural Food Store, Rochester, NY. The government's libel alleged the molasses was misbranded under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act because the book and the molasses had been shipped via the same carrier on five dates between November 1950 and January 1951 from Nature Food Centres, Inc. (Boston) to Rochester, and that this made the book unlawful 'labeling' for the molasses. The court GRANTED the publisher's motion to dismiss this libel, holding there were no factual allegations of 'functional interdependence' between the book and the product sufficient to make the book 'labeling' under the Act merely because they were shipped together. A companion libel over a different, later shipment survived a similar motion; see the companion source (hauser-molasses-libel-1951-ii).
NOTES
This is the first of two related 1951 federal libel actions arising from the same distribution scheme: Gayelord Hauser’s bestseller Look Younger, Live Longer handed out alongside a specific brand of blackstrap molasses at Nature Food Centres retail outlets. In this earlier action (decided 14 April 1951), the court dismissed the government’s libel against one seized shipment, finding that simple co-shipment of book and product did not by itself establish the book as unlawful “labeling” for the molasses under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The ruling is procedural (about what counts as “labeling”), not a finding on whether Hauser’s dietary claims were true or false. Read together with the companion opinion at 103 F. Supp. 626 (W.D.N.Y. 1951), where a later, more direct instance of point-of-sale distribution survived dismissal, the pair documents that federal regulators pursued Hauser’s flagship bestseller as a vehicle for commercial molasses claims through 1951, with mixed but not toothless results.