Plea for vegetarian food

Mixed salad leaves with berries, avocado and honey-mustard dressing

I WOULD like to highlight a very important issue that is silently happening in almost all of the Education Ministry’s matriculation colleges. I am a strict vegetarian who studied in one of these matriculation colleges five years ago.

I am vegetarian due to religious reasons. At the college, those of us who were vegetarians were told that we could not order our food from outside the college. The student affairs officer denied our formally-written request to order vegetarian food from outside and told us to our face that we could either “adjust” to the food in the college or fill up the form to leave and quit matriculation for good. We were hundreds of kilometres away from home and this was what the officer said to us. We felt dejected.