Journalist, Author & Syndicated Columnist
When we lived in Korea, my mother used to pack beautiful and delicious dosiraks (도시락) for my siblings to eat at school. By the time I started school, we had already immigrated to the United States, and I was sent to school with my lunch in either a brown paper sack or my favorite Archies lunch box.
As we were walking to school, I told my son, “One day, when you’re older, you won’t want to hold my hand anymore. And that’s OK. You’ll be bigger and won’t need me to help you cross the street.” Kyle looked up at me and said, “I’ll always want to hold your hand, Mommy. Always.”
A downtown office worker was so offended by the smell of a colleague’s spicy lunch, she called security. Now that’s passive aggressive.
For meat-eating parents, a child proclaiming his or her desire to convert to a vegetarian diet may indeed be a scary prospect. But it’s something more parents are facing on a daily basis. There are now more teenage vegetarians than ever before in the United States. According to a recent Roper poll, 11 percent of girls aged 13 to 17 said they eat no meat. And some 15 percent of the nation’s 15 million college students reported that they eat vegetarian meals at school.