vegan cheese: Okay here's the story. School starts in about a week. I'm vegetarian, and my school is very bad about school lunches, we could afford better but don't. 1/4 of my school is vegan/vegetarian and they don't serve us with better food. Yes, we could just bring our lunches to school, but we shouldn't have to! They do serve salads at our school but they come with chopped up pork in it! And even If we picked out the pork it wouldn't be vegan, CHEESE! And the luttuce in the salads are brown! We could also go to the Ale Carte, But even there you have a choice of cheese pizza[not vegan], soda, gatorade, ice cream[not vegan], and cookies[not vegan]! What shall I do? I'm thinking of just writing my school district a letter with a petition and if that doesn't work, I'm to the point where I'm Emailing PETA. Do you think this is a good Idea?|||Wow, I just had a salad to stave off hunger, and ate at home. Anyway, my plan of action (and don't involve peta, please!) 1. Have your parents mention it to the pta:parent/teacher assoc 2. Circulate a petition amongst students AND parents, which state whether they are students/parents, along with grade and homeroom teacher 3. Sample school menu, so they can see what is available. Try to keep it cheap. 4. If that doesn't work, find out who is in charge of menu planning (many times it's a matter of district, not school level), and show the numbers to prove that it behooves the school to cater to veg*ns. 5. If that doesn't work, then write to your local paper, start a school club (since you have the numbers), and become very active I couldn't do this at my school since we didn't have the numbers, but you do, so good luck|||HELL YEAH Get PETA on their asses!!! :D|||call the school. ask them too make better school lunches and if they dont, COMPLAIN. they should have a vegetarian choice!|||I find it hard to believe that you school offers no vegan options. Our cafeteria (I'm a teacher, not a student) has a salad bar. It's just like any salad bar where all of the items are separate and you assemble your own meal. The easiest thing is just to bring your own lunch. A quick, easy solution is a peanut butter sandwich. I usually bring an Amy's frozen vegan meal (but students don't have access to microwaves) or a salad with veggies, beans, and nuts.|||yes I would write to someone at the school first...you will have to sign a petition very likely. If they do not do anything about it...start bringing your own lunches http://www.vegetarianlunchbox.com http://www.veganlunchbox.com Also write to PETA if they dont do anything! The school should at least have one vegan option a day. There may be a law about it somewhere. Do a little more research then act on it :-) If they are firm on not doing it... Lie a little, tell them it is against your religion to eat animal products.|||HECK YEAH!!! You know, schools HAVE to honor all beleifs and customs, so make a petetion, talk to your guidance counciler, to get things done.|||I should say my daughter who is 24 had the salad bar option but my son who is 14 has not had that option. Our foods are actually cooked in one location and bused to each school...can you imagine that? i agree with your idea..another option is to get a *celebrity*chef.. Jaime Oliver is a huge fighter for fresh foods in schools problem is he is in UK....not in U>S>we need someone here to help us change the school foods parents dont mind paying more (our kids were charged more this past year)if they are getting a great quality food.|||My school is just like that! The salads have tuna, turkey, cheese, and ham in them and the plain ones still have cheese! We don't have a salad bar when you can get what you want. They come in individual containers and I hate them! But I like to take lunch to school so all the idiots will be amazed at how I eat! "Ohh my gosh you don't eat meat or drink milk? Is that tofu? Is that good?!?!" Never gets old LoL!!!|||What is PETA going to do exactly? You (and the other vegetarians / vegans in your school) need to take action and responsibility for this issue, not PETA. PETA may be able to give you tips on how to broach the subject, but ultimately it is your actions that will push for change. You could do a number of things to get your message across: 1) Start a petition and give it to your head of school. A polite presentation during a school assembly – if you have such a thing – may help to get your message out there into the wider community. 2) Encourage the writing of letters to get your point across. Write letters to the head of the facility and the board of governors If the first two fail, then getting the message out of the privacy of school and into the public arena may help your cause. Start writing letters to the editor of your local paper. When you have a letter published on the letters page of a paper, it often gets others interested, gets a debate started and helps to “push for change”. If you do write a letter to the board of governors or the newspaper, I suggest you do a spell and punctuation check first. You want to present your case in a clear and concise manner. You don’t want to look like an uneducated idiot in print. PLEASE NOTE: I am NOT suggesting you are an uneducated idiot (although there are quite a few spelling and punctuation mistakes in your question) I am just trying to emphasise that when writing to editors of newspapers, it is important to present yourself in a professional manner, as you are more likely to get your letter published and be taken seriously . .|||wow... I wish 1/4 of my school was Veg... you guys are AWESOME! My school is bad about lunches too, but luckily, I'm in highschool now so we have a saladbar and everything, but I remember when we had a #1 and #2... those were dark times... DARK times. THAT'S A GREAT IDEA! (and if you join the Street Team on PETA2.com you can tell them about your school goingVeg (making sure that there's an administrator that can verify) and earn 10000 points (that you can get cool free stuff with!)|||Stop your complaining. I am a vegan. I don't expect anyone to cater to my needs. Most kids aren't vegetarians. School lunches are made economically according to what the general population of kids eat. Either make due with what is at school or else bring in your own lunch. If you bring in your lunch then you will know what all the ingredients are. Sometimes there are hidden ingredients that you don't realize are in some foods. It would be ridiculous for you to get a petition signed or to contact PETA. Really, what do you think they are going to do for you? Nothing. They will just tell you to bring your lunch to school.|||When I was in high school, the school cafeteria was simply awful, entirely apart from questions of vegetarianism. So very few kids ate there. We mostly went across the street to either Ptomaine Joe's, where you could get a salami sandwich or a heavy potato knish for a modest price, or to Ralph's Grocery, an Italian place with cheeses hung from the ceiling, where you could buy any of several kinds of quite good sandwiches by the inch. I don't remember vegetarian offerings, but they may have had some. The main point is that the food was a lot better than the official school offering and was not expensive.|||Vegetarians at school? Intellect...Awareness...Conscience... Nevertheless, if the current uptrend is continue (and other factors remain unchanged), 43.2% of world population will be vegetarians by the year 2019. (Even some survey & researches predicted the figure would be much higher) This is where the world is leading to.