To the Editors:
I have a good deal of beef with your rather myopic outrage over the pilot attempt at "Meatless Monday" last week. If I may, I wish to add a little outrage of my own before the campus forgets about the event entirely.
Perhaps our very own "best Dining Service in the country" is an important part of the problem, but not for the reasons you have suggested.
We seem to be under the impression that the Dining Service provides us all with precisely what we want (whatever that may be) "regardless of political or religious persuasion"—a veritable cornucopia of "options" seven days a week.
I would like to pop that bubble. I stand just as militantly as you do for free choice and dissent, but I fear the Dining Service's cornucopia provides the mere illusion of choice.
When just four companies make up the U.S. meat industry (just the tip of the iceberg), and Bowdoin gets the majority of its meat from those companies' slavish subsidiaries, our choices are more limited than we think.
"Meatless Monday" has thus far inspired only whining. If it serves its purpose, it will get us thinking, and acting, too.
Sincerely,
Wesley Hartwell '11