The perfect food for rabbits briefly occupying human bodies!

You might assume that the disgraceful, liberal institution Columbia University in the City of New York would have a diverse spread of options for the various pescatarians, vegetarians, and vegans among us—but not at JJ’s Place, which as everyone knows is closer to the core of the earth and thus to hell. No—if you must enter the cold, indifferent embrace of JJ’s, and you elect not to eat a “hamburger” or a chicken sandwich, your options are limited.

You might choose a fried option—usually delicious, but with the awful side effect of making you feel like there’s a rock in your stomach. You might go for the bean burger, but if you choose this regularly you’re bound to slip up a few times (especially if, like most of the JJ’s clientele, you’re more than a few shots in) and question your, oh, deeply-felt identity as a champion of animals’ rights/environmental justice/the mortification of the flesh. 

And if you were in JJ’s on the night of February 7, you might try the “root vegetable wrap.”

I was enticed, I suppose, by the idea of the root vegetable wrap, which brought to mind autumnal visions of lightly seasoned squash and cornucopias. (Cornucopiae?) When I actually came face to face with the substance of the thing, however, I tried to return it to the bullpen of JJ’s items waiting for an open mouth. I trust if you look at the image above, that decision won’t need explanation. But, alas, I was thwarted; a member of the JJ’s staff asked me if I could please take it back in the same tone as a peasant asking the goodly viscount to please take her sickly child.

And as a lifetime member of the Clean Plate Club, I had to eat it.

What wasn’t advertised on the JJ’s menu was the thin layer of some anonymous sauce around the rim of the tortilla, which didn’t taste like much of anything but gave the whole affair more of a “garbage disposal sludge” vibe than it had before. As for the flavor of the actual item… it was bad. Bad bad bad bad. Imagine if you took the obligatory boiled “vegetable medley” at every Midwestern supper and wrapped it in a slightly stale tortilla along with some of the water you boiled it in. The vegetables lost their shape incredibly quickly, which meant that eating the wrap felt like chewing on vomit wrapped in rice paper. The rip on the end gave it the impression of a mad scientist’s experiment gone terribly, terribly wrong.

I didn’t sleep very well that fateful Wednesday night—whether that was due to the indigestion or the cosmic horror I’d just witnessed is anyone’s guess.

The wrap in question via Author