s an observant Hindu, Brij Sharma considers cows sacred. He
believes the gentle creatures are helpmates to human beings, and it
would be as unthinkable for him to eat beef as it would for a
cowboy in Montana to eat his own horse.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Sharma, an electrical engineer for Boeing in
Seattle, says that for years he never set foot in a McDonald's
restaurant. But in 1990, when the fast-food chain announced with
great fanfare that it was switching from beef fat to "100 percent
vegetable oil" to cook its French fries, Mr. Sharma joined the
legions of Hindu Americans and vegetarians who began venturing into
McDonald's to nibble what they believed were vegetarian fries. Mr.
Sharma's teenage son even took a job at McDonald's last year, and
drawn by the generous employee discount, the Sharma family consumed
countless bags of fries.

So Mr. Sharma said he was horrified when he opened his India West
newspaper in April and read, "Where's the Beef? It's in Your French
Fries." He and other American Hindus were outraged to learn that
McDonald's French fries are seasoned in the factory with beef
flavoring before they are sent to the restaurants to be cooked in
vegetable oil.

Now Mr. Sharma is one of three plaintiffs representing the Hindus
and vegetarians of America in a lawsuit filed on May 1 in Seattle
that accuses McDonald's of deliberately misleading its American
customers.

"I feel sick in the morning every day, like I want to vomit," Mr.
Sharma said in a recent interview. "Now it is always there in my
mind that I have done this sin."

The news ricocheted to India, where restaurant windows were
smashed, statues of Ronald McDonald smeared with cow dung, and
Hindu nationalist politicians called for the chain to be evicted
from the country. In Fiji, a majority of Hindus and vegetarians
told pollsters they had heard about the beef in the fries and
stopped eating at McDonald's.

McDonald's, a corporation that prides itself on catering to the
culinary requirements of ethnic and religious groups in its
restaurants overseas, says it uses no animal extracts in the French
fries it sells in India and in Fiji, where nearly half the
population is of Indian descent. A test of the French fries by an
Indian organization after the rioting confirmed the claims of the
company, which says it is going forward with plans to expand in
India.

McDonald's says it never said that the French fries sold in the
United States were vegetarian. The marketing campaign proclaiming
the switch to vegetable oil in 1990 was "all about healthy hearts
and eliminating cholesterol," Walt Riker, a spokesman for
McDonald's, said in an interview last week. "We certainly don't
market ourselves as vegetarian."

He said McDonald's added beef flavoring to the fries before they
were flash frozen, and complied with Food and Drug Administration
regulations by saying that it included "natural ingredients,"
without specifying what they were. And although McDonald's may
re-evaluate its labeling policies, Mr. Riker said, it does not
intend to alter its recipe.

"These are the ways the fries are made in the U.S., and we don't
have any plans to change," Mr. Riker said.

Burger King and Wendy's restaurants do not use beef products in
their French fries, their corporate spokesmen said in interviews on
Thursday.

Vegetarian groups had suspected there was beef flavoring in
McDonald's French fries and petitioned the company and the Food and
Drug Administration for full disclosure of ingredients with no
success. Fast- food restaurants are highly secretive about their
recipes, and it was only after the lawsuit was filed that
McDonald's spokesmen widely acknowledged the beef ingredient.

"They would post these lists of their ingredients in their stores,
but nowhere did they ever publicly admit that beef flavoring was
used in the fries," said James Pizzirusso, who founded the
Vegetarian Legal Action Network with other law students at George
Washington University.

"Corporate America needs to pay attention to consumers who avoid
certain food products for religious or health reasons, or because
they have allergies," he said. "They say they are complying with
the law in terms of disclosing their ingredients, but they should
go beyond the law." Vegetarian advocacy groups claim to represent
as many as 15 million Americans. And while those groups are
accustomed to confronting American corporations, the lawsuit is a
watershed for the Hindus in the United States. Mostly first- and
second-generation immigrants from India, with a smattering of
American converts, they are estimated to number more than one
million people. Until now, they have put far more effort into
educating their children and building temples to perpetuate their
religion than into pressuring the federal government or industry to
accommodate their customs.

The lawsuit came about when the vegetarian law students connected
with the outraged Hindus.

The students at George Washington University had drafted the legal
complaint as a project for a class on legal activism, and were
looking for a lawyer to file it. In Seattle, Harish Bharti, a Hindu
lawyer, read about the secret ingredient in the article in India
West and decided to sue.

India West heard about the ingredient from Hitesh Shah, a Los
Angeles software engineer and a strict vegetarian. He had sent an
e-mail inquiry about French fries to McDonald's, and received a
reply from a customer service representative who wrote that
McDonald's used "a minuscule amount of beef flavoring as an
ingredient in the raw product."

Mr. Bharti called Lige Weill, executive director of the Vegetarian
Awareness Network in Knoxville, Tenn. Mr. Weill had already
succeeded in getting the Wendy's chain to stop putting gelatin
(made of animal collagen) into the sauce on its Fresh Stuffed
Garden Veggie Pita.

Mr. Weill introduced the students to Mr. Bharti, who had been in
the news for suing corporations and defending battered women. Mr.
Bharti also teaches trial skills at the Gerry Spence College for
Trial Lawyers in Wyoming. "I see this as a fight for the dharma,"
said Mr. Bharti, using the Sanskrit word that loosely translated
means "ultimate principles."

"Eating a cow for a Hindu would be like eating your own mother,"
he said. "People have told me, `I would rather die here than go to
McDonald's.' " In the last 10 days, he has filed additional
lawsuits against McDonald's in California and in Canada.

In the Indian-American neighborhoods of Chicago and Houston, in
the sari shops and vegetarian restaurants, many Hindus said they
had heard about the lawsuit, but not all said they agreed with it.

Parag Gandhi, 32, the manager of the Taj Sari Palace in northwest
Chicago, said he considered himself "a McDonald's man," and thought
the Hindu plaintiff foolish. "I don't think Ronald McDonald walked
up to him and made him eat the French fries," Mr. Gandhi said.
"People should know that if they are eating at a place that serves
meat products that they have to be more than careful if they don't
want to eat meat. Come on, I mean it's McDonald's."

At the Anand Bhavan Vegetarian restaurant in Houston, Mahendra
Jagirdar, an engineer, said he had stopped eating at McDonald's
when he heard about the fries. "I'm a pretty strict vegetarian," he
said. "That's why I like a place like this where I don't have to
compromise."

As for Mr. Sharma, the plaintiff in Seattle, he is seeking ways to
cleanse himself. "I am now planning to go to India to take a dip in
the Ganges," said Mr. Sharma, the grandson of a Hindu religious
counselor to a maharajah. "I am thinking that it should reduce my
sin. But the damage is already done."