California Attorney General Opposes Animal Rights “Cancer” Lawsuit Against Grilled Chicken
Phony “Physicians Committee” Slammed For Cynical Courtroom Ploy
Sacramento – Today, the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom applauded California Supervising Deputy Attorney General Edward Weil, for arguing against an animal rights group seeking to use the state's Proposition 65 law to force cancer warning labels on grilled chicken sandwiches.
Last week, Weil wrote in a memorandum to Superior Court of California Judge Emilie Elias that the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM, a deceptively named animal rights group) “has submitted nothing to establish that there is any plausible claim that a warning is required,” and that “provision of the warning would not be in the public interest.”
His argument comes at a point in a pending case in which PCRM is seeking approval for a settlement under which consumers would be needlessly warned that eating grilled chicken could expose them to a cancer-causing chemical. But as the Attorney General writes, “warnings need not be provided where the chemical in question is created by a process [cooking] that actually has the net effect of making the food safer to eat, i.e., killing bacteria.”
Center for Consumer Freedom Director of Research David Martosko said: “The animal rights movement will stop at nothing to scare Americans into adopting a PETA-approved diet. Creating a phony ‘physicians’ group may be clever PR. But creating a phony cancer scare is public-health malpractice.”
During a March 2007 legal conference in San Francicso, PCRM General Counsel Dan Kinburn boasted of his plan to sue “virtually every restaurant in the state of California that is not serving an all-vegetarian diet.”
PCRM was last in the news when its affiliated group, another deceptive animal-rights front named The Cancer Project, demanded that hot dogs be excluded from the National School Lunch Program. (The single biggest study ever to examine meat and colon cancer diagnoses, a 2004 Harvard University project, found no link at all between the two.)
Judge Elias is scheduled to hear PCRM's motions to accept its proposed settlement on November 17 at 10:30am. A copy of Weil’s formal Objection can be downloaded at http://tinyurl.com/WeilPCRM
The Center for Consumer Freedom is a nonprofit coalition supported by restaurants, food companies, and consumers, working together to promote personal responsibility and protect consumer choices.
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