Syracuse, N.Y. - Vegetarian Patrick Fish doesn't expect meat eaters to comprehend his outrage.
But Fish feels he was deceived by Wendy's restaurants and tricked into eating something made from animal tissue. He likened his experience to someone unwittingly eating human remains.
"It's hard for non-vegetarians to understand. You feel like you've been tainted," said Fish, 31, a Utica computer programming consultant who says ethics don't allow him to justify killing animals for food.
In a $30 million lawsuit filed July 15 in U.S. District Court in Syracuse, Fish accused Wendy's fast-food chain of misrepresenting its veggie pitas as vegetarian fare.
He is suing the Dublin, Ohio-based company for false advertising in its nutritional guides and for violating his First Amendment rights by infringing on his moral conviction of not eating meat.
The lawsuit may be the first of many against Wendy's, said Lige Weill, president of the Washington-based Vegetarians Awareness Network, a consumer group which is considering filing a class-action lawsuit.
Fish touched off a nationwide furor against Wendy's among vegetarians last summer after he discovered the dressing in the vegetable pita included gelatin. Gelatin is made from animal tissues, including hides, and is often used to thicken low-fat foods.
Fish said that he bought the veggie pita on April 16, 1997, only after he received assurances from workers at a Wendy's in Utica that it contained no meat or animal byproducts.
Denny Lynch, a Wendy's spokesman, said the company had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment on it.
The restaurant chain, which has nearly 5,200 stores worldwide, took gelatin out of the dressing recipe after complaints from vegetarian groups, he said. Thousands of nutritional guides were recalled.
"A mistake was made," Lynch said. The company said it never advertised the sandwich as a vegetarian product.
But both Fish and Weill said they tried for weeks to get Wendy's to fix the problem and change its advertising. Weill said it wasn't until the story attracted media attention that the company made the change.
Meat Industry Insights News Service
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