Tubby Tots In Belfast Told: ‘Eat Your Greens!’

Giant ‘Carrot’ Takes Vegetarian Message – and Food – to Schools

For Immediate Release:
27 January 2004

Contact:
Andrew Butler 020 7357 9229, ext 230; 0779 344 4020
Dawn Carr 020 7357 9229, ext 224

Belfast – With as many as one-third of children in Northern Ireland classified as overweight or obese, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have dispatched their vegetarian mascot Chris P Carrot to promote healthy, fat-fighting, vegetarian diets to a school in Belfast (dubbed the UK’s fourth fattest city by Muscle & Fitness magazine),

Date:  Wednesday, 28 January
Time:  3 pm
Place: Braniel Primary School, Ravenswood Park, Belfast

The tenacious tuber will be handing out pro-vegetarian leaflets to kids as they leave school, urging them to eat their veggies – not their friends – and giving vegetarian starter kits to mums and dads, as well as samples of vegetarian sausages (which contain around half the fat of traditional meat-based sausages) for families to try at home.

Meaty meals, high in saturated animal fat and cholesterol, have long been linked to the three biggest killers in the UK, heart disease, cancer and strokes, while a pure vegetarian diet will help shed the pounds and has even been shown to reverse the effects of heart disease. If that isn’t reason enough to kick the meat habit, the way animals are raised and slaughtered on modern factory farms is enough to make anyone lose his or her lunch. Intensively bred and housed, animals are kept in cramped, unnatural conditions and are routinely mutilated without anaesthetics. Modern slaughter methods mean that many animals are not rendered fully unconscious before they are hung upside-down to have their throats slit and are bled to death.

‘Put a child in an orchard with a lamb, and everyone knows that he or she will eat the fruit and play with the lamb, not the other way round’, says Andrew Butler, PETA campaign coordinator and father of a healthy vegan daughter. ‘We should be fostering children’s natural empathy and respect for animals while teaching them healthy eating habits, which will protect them from heart disease and other meat- and dairy-related health problems when they grow up.’

For more information, please visit GoVeg.co.uk. The vegetarian sausages were kindly donated by Turtle Island Foods. For more information about their meatless products, please visit Tofurky.com.

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