If you were to dangle a carrot and a chicken nugget in front of a kid during school lunch, there’s no doubt as to which option will end up on the tray.
But what if Junior didn’t even have chicken as an option on the table?
As NPR reports, the MUSE School in Malibu, which was co-founded by director James Cameron’s wife, Suzy Amis Cameron, is going full-fledged vegan.
“We are gradually moving towards a plant-based menu because we do call ourselves an environmental school,” Amis Cameron told NPR. “Within the next year and a half we will be plant-based.”
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While school lunch menus around the country are offering much healthier fare (there’s even an all-vegetarian school in Queens, New York), the MUSE school is the first in the nation to forgo any type of animal-based product, such as eggs or dairy.
The Camerons are also vegan, with the Avatar director saying last month in a Reddit Ask Me Anything that he’s been on a diet devoid of “a single molecule of anything that came from an animal” for two years.
It’s all part of the school’s effort to keep their students healthy while reducing their carbon footprint. As Amis Cameron tells NPR, she was appalled to find out all the water and grain it takes to produce meat and dairy, plus all of the greenhouse gas emissions, waste, and pollution that production generates.
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The school, which has an enrollment of 140 students ages two to 12, is already remarkably environmentally conscious, the Los Angeles Times reports. MUSE is zero-waste, has plans to run completely on renewable energy, and students already grow 20 percent of their cafeteria food via a farm-to-table program.
Unsurprisingly, the push to forgo all meat-based products has been met with some push-back from parents.
“Food is a very sensitive subject for so many people,” Amis Cameron told NPR. “People have their cultural reasons for eating meat, their traditional reasons, their likes and dislikes. But slowly we are offering educational programs through MUSE, for not only the children, mainly for the grownups, because the children, they live and breathe [the environmental way] already.”
What are your thoughts? Would you want your kid to go to this school?
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