San Francisco is making history again — and not the good kind where we invent something useful. The city has filed what's being described as the first major lawsuit targeting the ultra-processed food industry, presumably hoping to do for Doritos what tobacco litigation did for Marlboros.

Let's get a few things straight. Ultra-processed foods are genuinely terrible for you. The science linking them to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and a growing list of other health problems is increasingly hard to argue with. Nobody here is carrying water for Big Food.

But here's where the liberty-minded among us should raise an eyebrow: since when is it the government's job to litigate your lunch?

San Francisco has a long and inglorious history of trying to regulate personal choices — soda taxes, Happy Meal toy bans, you name it. The city treats its residents like children who can't be trusted to read a nutrition label. And yet, for all the paternalism, obesity rates and diet-related disease haven't exactly cratered. It's almost like top-down mandates aren't a substitute for personal responsibility and better education.

The deeper issue is one of incentives. Lawsuits like these tend to enrich attorneys and generate headlines for politicians, while doing approximately nothing for the families supposedly being harmed. Remember the tobacco settlement? States pocketed billions and spent most of it on things completely unrelated to public health. If history is any guide, this is less about protecting San Franciscans and more about City Hall expanding its regulatory footprint — and maybe its budget.

If the city actually wanted to help, it could start by making fresh, healthy food more accessible in underserved neighborhoods, cutting the red tape that makes it expensive to open small grocery stores, or investing in nutrition education in public schools. You know, things that empower individuals rather than empower bureaucrats.

Instead, we get a splashy lawsuit that lets elected officials posture as warriors against corporate greed while the underlying problems — food deserts, poor health literacy, and sky-high cost of living that pushes families toward cheap processed calories — remain firmly unaddressed.

Sue all the food companies you want. It won't put a salad on anyone's table.