WASHINGTON -The nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom is warning consumers and the media that a lawsuit filed in New Jersey this morning is an animal rights initiative in disguise. The Cancer Project, a radical organization with ties to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is suing hot dog producers and asking the court to require a cancer-risk warning label on all hot dog packages sold in New Jersey.
“Last summer the Cancer Project used Tony Snow’s death as an occasion to lecture Americans about their ‘pepperoni addiction,’ and this year they’re clogging up the courts with hot dog lawsuits,” said CCF Director of Research David Martosko. “It’s all part of the same desperate ploy to scare Americans into veganism.”
The Cancer Project is a branch of the equally misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a group whose place at the center of the animal rights movement has been exposed in Newsweek and The New York Times. PCRM derives more than two-thirds of its budget from Nanci Alexander, the wealthy founder of the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida. PETA has steered an additional $1.3 million to the organization.
“The membership in this so-called Physicians Committee is 96 percent free of actual doctors, and its Cancer Project spinoff is just a vehicle to create fear over food that’s not PETA-approved,” said Martosko. “Together, they’re phonier than a tofu dog.”
Mainstream nutritionists have questioned any link between meat and colon cancer diagnoses, and a 2004 Harvard University study – the largest of its kind – found no such link at all. This confirms the view of the American Dietetic Association that “no single food or type of food is necessarily detrimental to health.”
Martosko continued: “Legitimate experts are going to come in and tell the judge that there’s no proven link between hot dogs and cancer. This is going to be a giant waste of the court’s time and taxpayers’ money.”
