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“Learning doesn’t stop in the classroom. Education takes place in the kitchen, in the lunch line, in school gardens, and with any platform that helps students connect the dots between diet and health.” – Dr. Neal Barnard Today, with love in our hearts for our young ones, we will continue our discussion of vegan meal options in schools around the world. In 2014, then-12-year-old vegan student and youth athlete Lila Copeland started a campaign to institute vegan lunch options in her school district, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), in California, USA. Lila worked alone for the first year, then rallied the support of her community, including 300 fellow students, and recruited powerful vegan advocates from around the world to speak on behalf of the campaign. The team effort paid off. In 2017, the LAUSD school board unanimously agreed to roll out a pilot program to trial vegan lunch options in seven district schools for 90 days. The pilot was so successful that the daily vegan options have since expanded to about 100 schools districtwide, as of 2019. Then, there is the remarkable case of the city of Ghent in Belgium. In 2009, out of environmental concerns, it became the first city in the world to have an official vegetarian day once a week. Every Thursday, the meat-free fare is served in city schools, restaurants, and public buildings. Students, along with parents, are encouraged to attend one of the city’s 40 free classroom cooking workshops. On top of that, teachers are also given a course dedicated to recipes and tools to promote vegetarian and vegan cooking in the classroom. For decades, the world-renowned humanitarian and enlightened spiritual Master Supreme Master Ching Hai has promulgated veganism as critical for the health of our younger generations and Mother Earth: “Now, we can see meat is everywhere, legally killing us and our children, legally killing our planet, killing the environment on massive scales! We must stop animal production now and at all costs if we want to keep this planet called home. The government gives subsidies to animal industry anyway, so these subsidies can also be used instead to turn meat and related businesses into wholesome vegan businesses: good for the people, good for the business, good for the planet. Doing this we only gain hugely. Not just immediately, but for the long, long run, and we can keep this planet forever and make it into a paradise by just throwing that meat away and stop the animal industry.”
