The Quest for Sunshine, Rainbows and Good Food

Meatless Mondays. No-flush Tuesdays. Naked Wednesdays. Electricity-free Thursdays. By Friday, we’ll be biking to school, chewing pasture-raised ice cubes for lunch and drinking organic water for dinner, all while holding hands and singing Kumbaya.

Meat: that juicy, blood-soaked, crispy-edged, salted beauty descended straight from the heavens. It’s right up there with oxygen and Tecate Light on any Regio’s survival list. We machacado it in the morning, stuff it between two buns in the afternoon, and engulf a tortilla around it in the evening. An addiction we’re proud of. A custom most are not willing to change.

In a fashion reminiscent of Stalin or Castro, the Green-Badged Police (otherwise known as the “Green Team”) tyrannically seized from us the lame, à la masse, cafeteria sandwiches we’re all used to, took out the greasy deshebrada, replaced it with tasty, organic air, and branded it proudly vegetarian.

Talk about a lousy Monday.

If you want to convince someone electric cars are the future, you don’t put them on the backseat of a Nissan Leaf, you let them go Ludicrous Speed on a Tesla through Valle Poniente. Not all electric cars are dorky and not every vegetarian sandwich is depressing. How about a fiber-packed, hearty black bean burger, possibly with ketchup-glazed potato fries on the side to make it more appealing?

Yes, we realize taste tests were conducted, and that it’s not entirely the Green Team’s fault; but students’ dissatisfaction with Meatless Monday is widespread: the food is nowhere near what it was on the taste tests.

Although the effort to reduce the school’s carbon footprint is respectable, Meatless Mondays have misled students into believing vegetarian equals yucky. All we’ve achieved is convince the die-hard carnivores of ASFM their presumptions were right all along: a vegetarian sandwich is nothing but a joyless bucketload of make-believe cheese sprinkled with overcooked veggies. This makes students even less likely to opt for a vegetarian option outside the confines of our school.

If they were skeptical, now they’re convinced.