You may have read this story in the Chicago Tribune yesterday:

District fires vegan art teacher

Dave Warwak said he wouldn’t return to the classroom unless Fox River Grove Middle School served only lunches free of animal products, but with meat still on the menu, school officials on Monday fired the art teacher.

[...] The board, which voted 7-0 to fire Warwak, said in a prepared statement that he told pupils not to tell their parents, teachers or the school’s principal what he was teaching and that he repeatedly refused to answer questions from school officials on that subject.

The statement also said Warwak converted his art classes into classes on veganism and animal rights.

Warwak, who spoke on his own behalf, chastised administrators for hiding from pupils what he called the truth about healthy eating habits.

“You are ruining my world and eating my friends,” he said. Steve Beyer, whose 13-year-old son was one of Warwak’s pupils, told the board that the teacher was supposed to “teach art, not use his classroom as a platform for his vegan ideas.”

But enough about this vegan trainwreck. I could go on, but mocking vegans is like shooting fish in a barrel with an M16.

Well, just one more story: An old co-worker of mine I’ll call Sam has a wife, Jennifer, who’s a personal chef to a wealthy Chicago entrepreneur. She was planning and preparing a large, formal dinner for a number of VIPs, but the thing that was giving her the most grief was that she was informed just two days before the event that one of the guests was a vegan. Not just any vegan, but a strict raw-food vegan. This individual personally phoned Jennifer to inform her of these very specific dietary restrictions. That meant no baked goods, no pasta, no rice, not even any of that nasty rubbery abomination of pristine, delicious soy called texturized vegetable protein.

So poor Jennifer, a very competent cook and a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, was so stressed out about her raw-food vegan dilemma that Sam took it upon himself to ask a bunch of web developers, most of whom consider a sandwich gourmet if it has a toothpick in it, if they had any suggestions for his wife. After Sam and I spent some time explaining the exotic ideologies of veganism and raw-foodism, the suggestions came rolling in.

I recommended a salad for the main and a fruit salad for dessert. “But it’s a seven-course meal,” Sam pointed out. My ideas were no better than anyone else’s: a head of lettuce, a coconut, a watermelon carved into the shape of a swan and stuffed with melon balls; none of these were satisfactory. After 45 minutes of deliberation, we came to a consensus: a large roasted pig, wrapped in bacon and resting on a bed of perfectly sliced prosciutto (that was my contribution), with a big, juicy red apple stuck in its mouth. Sam shook his head and went home. “But the apple is vegan and raw!” we called after his retreating figure.

The following Monday, I asked Sam how Jennifer’s dinner went and if she’d succeeded in coming up with some raw-food vegan dishes. “It was great!” he said enthusiastically, and described some of them, one of which was a creamy chilled cucumber-avocado soup, without the cream, of course. All of the vegan courses sounded fantastic, and I asked him if the raw-food vegan enjoyed the specially prepared food. Sam shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “She never showed up.”