Salad Days

Davis Bates, 23, is in his last term at experimental Hampshire College in Massachusetts, majoring in "political theater and mime." So when his work in the college kitchen began to get boring, he turned to the salads to provide drama.

NO NUKES! he proclaimed with carrot sticks surrounded by mushrooms. He made solar power symbols out of lemon slices on Jell-O and hammers and sickles out of cheese rinds. He even constructed a nuclear power plant out of cottage cheese, tilted slightly to signify a meltdown.

The food service director preferred culinary to political art, however, and ordered him to hold the garnishes. When Bates responded by writing HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARX in whipped cream on a cake, he was fired. He has appealed his ouster, and the issue is now before the college president. The wilted salads have mushroomed, he says, into a principle: "Where you have no employer-employee structure to deal with firings, there's no possibility of any community response." Or, more simply, they won't lettuce have our say.

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