In November, this Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) billboard greeted Iowans near Des Moines in anticipation of the annual Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival this month. The Wall Street Journal reports that these “vegetarian doctors” plan to hand out pamphlets at the festival with warnings about how “bacon rotting in your mouth” can cause cancer and diabetes. (That sounds an awful lot like the long-debunked “meat rots in your colon” claim—a PETA favorite.)
The vegan animal rights group also recommends eating bacon-like soy strips to avoid “the embarrassment” associated with eating this meat. We think the folks attending this year’s festival — dubbed “Baconpocolypse Now: I Love the Smell of Bacon in the Morning” — would be more embarrassed by consuming the soy “fak’n” than the real thing.
This type of over-the-top rhetoric is typical of the group whose president has called cheese “dairy crack” and used to run The PETA Foundation. PCRM’s PETA-like tactics make great material for comedians – just ask Jon Stewart – but its extreme positions don’t seem to be actually winning over many fans. Green Bay Packers fans didn’t have much to cheer about last year when PCRM displayed the fans’ signature Cheesehead hats atop the Grim Reaper, and it’s unlikely New Yorkers were inspired by PCRM’s gross “Your Abs on Cheese” ads. Maybe PCRM will steal a page from the Humane Society of the United States playbook and pull the faux wool over the public’s eye by masking its animal rights agenda with cute puppies and kittens instead.
