Fresh from winning a settlement with McDonald’s over whether or not its french fries were vegetarian or not, Seattle attorney Harish Bharti is now looking to target Pizza Hut’s Veggie Lover’s pizza.
Bharti’s proposed lawsuit claims that Pizza Hut “intentionally market their pizza to the vegetarian community, knowing full well that the foods are not vegetarian.”
As with the lawsuit against McDonald’s, Bharti’s suit is weak but Pizza Hut might choose to settle, like McDonald’s did, for the public relations value of doing so. The problem is that the word “vegetarian” has a very loose meaning which Bharti himself illustrates when criticizing Pizza Hut. According to Bharti,
While they claim it’s a vegetarian product, they have a beef product in their cheese.
Cheese? The last time I checked, that was also an animal product.
As with the McDonald’s case, if there is any beef byproduct in the pizzas (and Pizza Hut claims there is not), it is used as a flavoring in the pizza sauce. Given that, for Bharti, vegetarians include people who eat animal products such as cheese, I don’t think Pizza Hut would face much of a challenge demonstrating that products which contain small amounts of beef byproducts for flavoring could nonetheless be described as vegetarian, and that consumers interested in products without any animal byproducts should be looking for those labeled as vegan.
Source:
Lawsuit claims ‘Veggie Lover’s’ pizza contains a ‘beef product’. Sam Skolnik
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 2, 2002.