Death by hot dog

pinks-losangeles-cholesterol-597935-l According to a great story in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, a group of fanatic vegans is suing several hot dog makers in New Jersey, demanding that wiener packages include the label, “Warning: Consuming hot dogs and other processed meats increases the risk of cancer.” Hey, vegans: “Warning: Hijacking the courts in a lame ‘this-is-for-your-own-good’ attempt to get others to adopt your laughable rabbit-like eating habits increases the risk that most Americans will like you even less than they already do.”

The vegan advocacy group is the nonprofit The Cancer Project. On its website, it backs up its hot dogs=cancer argument this way: “In 2007, the American Institute for Cancer Research published a landmark report showing that just one 50-gram serving of processed meat (about the amount in one hot dog) consumed daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer, on average, by 21 percent.” Well, OK. I believe it. No one ever told me that a hot dog a day kept the doctor away. But this lawsuit against Nathan’s Famous and the owners of Oscar Mayer and Hebrew National goes way too far — and kudos to the Times for treating this story with the “Oh, please” tone it deserves.

Efforts to put warning labels on hot dog packages are “crazy,” said Josh Urdang, 27, as he stood in line to buy two franks at Pink’s hot dog stand in Hollywood on Tuesday.

“It wouldn’t change how many hot dogs I eat. Not at all,” said Urdang, an information technology consultant from Hollywood.

His friend Joe Di Lauro, 31, called such a move “overpolicing. . . . At what point do you stop breaking things down? Unless we’re going to put a warning label on every single food and say what’s bad in it.”

Other consumers were skeptical of the Cancer Project’s agenda.

“Vegans complaining about hot dogs is like the Amish complaining about gas prices,” said Susan Thatcher of Irvine.

These hot dog lovers have nailed it. Sure, a mishmash of animal byproduct packed into a synthetic tubular skin may not be the best thing for us, but it’s hardly the worst, and if the courts start demanding warning labels on hot dogs (in New Jersey? Really? Should of tried Oregon first.), then we ought to slap ‘em on just about every item in aisles 3-11 of the supermarket. This is America — most things we put into our bodies are bad for us.

As if the lawsuit wasn’t bad enough, The Cancer Project’s also posted an absurd scare ad online, in which cute kids, in between delicious shots of hot dogs, pizza and some sort of bologna, lament their cancer symptoms. Check it out. Then eat a chili dog in protest.

(Photo: permanently scatterbrained/Flickr)

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