After a 24 hour closure for “repairs” over the alumni weekend, Duke students and alumni alike were shocked to find that every restaurant in the newly-renovated West Union had been repealed and replaced by the “vegan-only” restaurant, Sprout.
Gone are the stations of Indian fare, the $10,000 pizza oven shipped over from Italy and the ramen station. All have been replaced by sprouts of the Union’s least popular vegetarian and vegan outlet, Sprout. The poké have been replaced with a “make-your-own-kale-salad” station, the café turned into an almond-milk-only station and the Faculty Commons succeeded by a farm-to-table tofu restaurant.
According to YikYak, recent postings on the Duke “Fix My Campus” Facebook page and the two juniors recently back from Copenhagen whom I overheard on the C1, students are outraged that they’ve lost the dishes they had learned to love to hate.
An anonymous first-year who proudly received a “B-” in Econ 201 last semester told Monday Monday, “I’d eaten Sitar every day for lunch for four months and I was only just now learning how to complain about the monotony of the Duke Dining experience to my friends and neighbors. What am I supposed to do now? The laws of supply and demand won’t keep this up. LMo will have to make the change back.”
A small group of students have begun assembling in the upstairs teaching kitchen, demanding the Duke administration bring back the crepe station with the watery nutella at the very least, in addition to establishing a $15 minimum wage and abolishing all prisons in the contiguous United States.
Tents have sprouted up in the past hour as more and more students join their protest, which was quickly dubbed “W-Ville” for continuity’s sake, even if it doesn’t rhyme with “K.” The administration has already begun alternative plans for the demonstration schedule on Earth Day by celebrity chef, Guy Fieri.
When asked about the recent changes, Doctor, Vice President of Student Affairs, Grandfather, Email Enthusiast and Vegan Czar Lawrence Moneta, PhD, admitted he was “pretty excited about these changes.”
“I’m not going to lie,” he told Monday Monday. “It was all me. The whole West Union? Yeah, it was me. Oh, and the vegan thing? It was me too. Did you know I’m a vegan?”
He noted that the lack of soda in the West Union was his first step at total health domination. The Italian soda was a “cute” afterthought to try and appease the student body while he executed his real plan for making the student body subsist on a powerful, plant-based diet—free of dairy, processed sugars and meat.
According to Moneta, most of the new eateries in the West Union will be sustained by the Duke Campus Farm which that weird P-Wild kid from down your hall goes to on occasion. Students were shocked to learn that the campus farm actually existed, as most only knew it as a sticker found on the laptop of the “edgy” TA who went to Bard for undergrad. However, because it’s only early spring, most of the vegetables will be shipped in from local places like “Ecuador” and “Costa Rica.”
This shift in the West Union towards strict veganism is symbolic of a larger change on Duke’s campus towards freedom and diversity of thought. Moneta added that 2017 would bring a number of sizable changes to the gothic wonderland that students had begun to know and bemusingly despise. The university has already committed to destroying Central Campus and building a new center of campus by 2025, assuming that mold doesn’t sprout up and take over before then.
“The mold is vegan too,” Moneta added excitedly.
He said the faculty council had made big plans to hire one conservative public policy professor before 2020, though political science professor and token Republican Peter Feaver had been told by President-Elect Vincent Price “not to hold his breath.”
The change Moneta is most hopeful about, however, is the committee of students, faculty and staff he has been leading, titled, “Veganism: A Culture Under Siege.” An anonymous Duke Student Government Representative and McKinsey 2017 summer analyst on the committee added they were “incredibly excited about the findings,” which concluded that the “only way to properly establish a culture accepting of Veganism at Duke was to create a question on the application for admission.” They added that the application for the Class of 2022 will feature a drop-down menu in which students can choose their meat consumption identity. The common application will feature Carnivore, Pescetarian, Vegetarian and Vegan choices, in addition to a “write-in-your-own meat consumption identity.”
Dean of Admissions and avid sunhat wearer Christoph Guttentag is hoping to use this method as a way of expanding the diversity of the class. The dean, who only reads applications for the exotic island of Manhattan, noted that the new question will distinguish the candidates from Horace Mann, Stuyvesant and Fieldston more distinctly, in addition to giving them direct insight into their parents’ earnings and potential Duke Annual Fund giving, despite a “need-blind” application.
“You think a kid from Midtown who eats a ‘strictly green, ovo-vegetarian diet’ has parents who aren’t going to give $1,000 to Duke Forward in the coming year? Please,” Guttentag said, after ordering an unsweetened vanilla almond milk, holding the coffee.
Written while enjoying day-old “vegan” pumpkin bread from Vondy.
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