Vegetarian Club Has a Beef With New Administrator

Santa Monica College Vegetarian Club President Ryan Flegal lifted his head, threw back his shoulder-length brown hair and chewed his pita bread sandwich with a rapturous, no-animal-fat smile. When he finished gulping down a slug of vegetable hot dog, potato salad, bean dip, sprouts and non-dairy cottage cheese, though, Flegal had to apologize.

“I bet you are all wondering why I can eat this and you can’t,” he told a sun-splashed gathering of students this week outside the Student Union. “We worked all summer for this and now the administration says we can’t give you a free lunch.”

Fifty or so students smiled and shook their heads, covetously eyeing the unopened bags of vegetarian chips, capped bottles of murky organic apple juice and jars of exotic dips that would remain sealed. For the second week in a row, the vegetarians had been denied their veggies. They were not happy.

Since classes resumed last month, a dispute between the club and a college administrator over a weekly “Lunch ‘N Lecture” series has become something of a tempest in a tofu pot at the 24,000-student college. The student activists say they have been tainted by charges of cultism, and worse yet, commercialization.

Bright-eyed and enthusiastic members of the club, which claims 600 members, have blamed the school’s second-ranking administrator for blocking their weekly free lunches in a fit of bureaucratic pique. The administrator, Deputy Supt. Thomas J. Donner, said rules are rules. He simply wants the club to get permission from the Health Department before queuing up for its fruits and nuts.

The result is that for the last two weeks, the vegetarians’ weekly Tuesday gathering on a patch of grass near the Student Union has been simply lecture, without the lunch. With its next event scheduled for Tuesday, the Vegetarian Club is fighting to get the vegetables back on the program. Without its star attractions, the club is crippled, said Flegal.

“The club is a vegetarian club. It’s about food,” he said. “We are trying to improve people’s internal and external ecology. In other words, we are trying to make them healthier and we are trying to make the planet healthier too.”

Many of the club’s speakers, including Tamar Hurwitz of the Rainforest Action Network last week, describe the destructive effects of the meat industry in clear-cutting the Earth’s forests to create grazing land and damaging the Earth’s atmosphere through animal methane emissions.

Members such as Flegal, 21, have made the ultimate commitment to stop those trends. He is a vegan, a vegetarian so orthodox that even animal products such as eggs, butter and cheese will not pass his lips. He won’t wear leather shoes or belts.

Many club members take a more moderate course--simply eschewing beef and poultry. They said the Tuesday lunches are a welcome alternative to campus food concessions more attuned to the carnivorous palate.

The Vegetarian Club got its start last year and served several of its free picnic lunches without incident. But the beef started when another administrator retired and Donner took over supervision of many student activities, the deputy superintendent conceded.

The administrator said his training as a lawyer made him more concerned about the potential liability of serving food informally off folding tables, without a clear authorization from the county Department of Health Services.

In response to that complaint, club members presented a memo to school officials at the end of the last school year, in which a county health specialist said no permit was required for the picnics, as long as they were limited to club members. That was not good enough, Donner responded. He wanted a more detailed letter from the Health Department, telling how club membership should be defined and specifying how to prevent food contamination.

Terrance Powell, chief environmental health specialist in the county Health Department’s west district, said in an interview that he believes the dispute can be resolved fairly easily. He inspected the club’s first picnic in August and raised some concerns about potential contamination, such as food packages being stacked on the ground or served in large open containers.

The health concerns are just the most recent raised by Donner. Earlier, he complained that a photo of a bikini-clad woman on one of the club’s flyer’s was “sexually degrading.” He also objected to the flyer’s reproduction of logos of organic food companies, which had donated samples to the club, saying they were unauthorized advertisements that invoked the college’s name.

The club agreed to bag the logos, but protested that attempts to change the content of the flyer amounted to an abridgment of free speech. “He was just looking for another window to shut us down,” Flegal said.

David Phillips, faculty adviser to the vegetarians and director of the college’s Center for Environmental Studies, said the club’s popularity “has led to a sort of hyper-scrutiny by the administration.”

He noted that rumors even swirled that a cult backed the students or that they were being paid by organic food companies attempting to gain a foothold on the campus.

“There has been a misinterpretation of the forces behind the success of this club,” Phillips said. “It’s not a cult. It’s not a commercial venture. It’s a lot of excited, enthusiastic students who are really working their butts off to communicate a message to other students.”