Is meat ok? Student potluck in the age of identity politics

The room was booked, the date was set, and the Facebook event was made. The students of Advanced Migration Studies were going to host a julefrokost.

As Master’s students studying contemporary human migration at The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen (a liberal-minded institution), the milleu of attendees was going to be unsurprisingly anti-establishment. As such, we decided that though the event took the name of the Danish cultural rite of the julefrokost we would buck tradition and create a feast of international holiday dishes for a lovely (and mostly non-denominational) evening.

“Eating pork or not shouldn’t be an identity.”

Student Janna Aldaraji, vegetarian

Three days before the luncheon one of the Advanced Migration students posed a question on the event page, asking “Can we make this a vegetarian thing?”.

A vegetarian thing

The suggestion was not surprising given that around 25 percent of the forty students in the program are committed vegetarians, and many of the others eat vegetarian food happily and often. There was some immediate support for the suggestion indicated by likes and emojis and enthusiastic comments.

Article originally published April 10th, 2019 by Uniavisen. Click here to read the rest of the original piece.