the infamous veggie poster
I had one returning student during my first session at CTY this year. I knew she had been slandering me when I overheard another student exclaim to the other: “…and she, like, makes you eat a whole PLATE of vegetables at lunch!”
This fearsome reputation is wholly unfounded. Really. But I suppose it takes its root in my one veggie rule: each student had to eat one serving of vegetable(s) at lunch. A few carrot sticks: sure! A small bowl of salad: absolutely. But the announcement of this rule on the first day of class always causes a mysterious keening noise to emit from the mouths of my students.
The first few days of lunch had you piling leaves of iceberg lettuce or tomatoes on your plates. Then there were the spud-lovers: a plateful of french fries drenched with ketchup (or alarmingly, mustard). One girl I sent back into the cafeteria for vegetables came back with a single, insolent kernel of corn.
You can’t say I didn’t warn you, kiddies. I explicitly said: “lack of veggies leads to bowel unhappiness.” You ignored me and continued to kick your neighbor’s chair instead. And the happy results? One of you had to use the bathroom over 5 times throughout the day (I knew because I had to stand in the hall and wait for you to finish). Another one of you turned green suddenly in the bookstore and begged to use the bathroom; after finishing, you came up to me and said, frankly: “that was good because I have been constipated for 3 days.”
So I created the veggie poster. No to potatoes (baked, fried, or tottified), corn, iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, etc. Would anyone out there like to debate whether or not corn counts as a veggie? Because I got a lot of lip from the kids about that.
The end result was that I struck terror in the hearts of children. Which, after all, is what camp is all about.
