'Baywatch' Babe Bingham Gets Wrapped

By Jo Cavallo

07/18/2002 at 12:10 PM EDT

Former "Baywatch" star and Playboy model Traci Bingham traded in her real bathing suit for one made out of fake lettuce to protest the killing of animals for food, reports Reuters. Carrying a sign that read "Go Vegetarian," Bingham stood in front of a well-known steak restaurant alongside a busy shopping street in Berlin in a protest organized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal-rights group. "I love to wear lettuce because I don't like to wear fur," Reuters quotes the actress as saying. Bingham, 34, is also appearing in a provocative ad for PETA, running in the current issue of Gear magazine, in which her body is labeled with the names of choice pieces of meat. The protest was sparked because the German restaurant sponsored a meat-industry conference this year. The manager of the restaurant asked the actress to leave the premises when she came in with a crowd of reporters and ordered a vegetarian meal. Bingham isn't the first beauty to strip down for PETA; others have included actresses Dominique Swain, Pamela Anderson and Kim Basinger as well as model Naomi Campbell.