LYON, France — Grégory Doucet, the mild-mannered Green party
mayor of Lyon, hardly seems a revolutionary. But he has upended France by
announcing that elementary school lunch menus for 29,000 Lyonnais children
would no longer include meat.
اضافة اعلان
An outrage! An ecological diktat that could signal the end of
French gastronomy, even French culture! Ministers in President Emmanuel Macron’s
government clashed. If Lyon, the city of beef snouts and pigs’ ears, of
saucisson and kidneys, could do such a thing, the apocalypse was surely
imminent.
“The reaction has been quite astonishing,” Doucet, 47, said.
“My decision was purely
pragmatic,” he insisted, eyes twinkling — a means to speed up lunches in
socially distanced times by offering a single menu rather than the traditional
choice of two dishes.
Not so, thundered Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister. He
tweeted that dropping meat was an “unacceptable insult to French farmers and
butchers” that betrays “an elitist and moralist” attitude. Julien Denormandie,
the agriculture minister, called the mayor’s embrace of the meatless lunch “shameful
from a social point of view” and “aberrational from a nutritional point of
view.”
All of which prompted Barbara Pompili, the minister of
ecological transition, to speak of the “prehistoric” views, full of “hackneyed
clichés,” of these men in effect calling two of her Cabinet colleagues
Neanderthals.
This heated exchange over little illustrated several things.
Macron’s government and party, La République en Marche, remain an uneasy
marriage of right and left. The rising popularity of the Greens, who run not
only Lyon but also Bordeaux and Grenoble, has sharpened a cultural clash
between urban environmental crusaders and the defenders of French tradition in
the countryside.
Not least, nothing gets the French quite as dyspeptic as
disagreement over food.
The mayor, it must be said, made his move in a city with an
intense gastronomic tradition. At the Boucherie François on the banks of the
Rhône, a centennial establishment, Lyon’s culture of meat is on ample display.
The veal liver and kidneys glistened; cuts of roast beef; the heads of yellow
and white chickens lolled on a counter; the saucissons, some with pistachio,
took every cylindrical form; the pastry-wrapped pâté showed off a core of foie
gras.
“The mayor made a mistake,” said François Teixeira, a butcher
who has worked at François for 19 years. “This is not good for Lyon’s image.”
Certainly, the mayor’s decision came at a sensitive moment. The
right in France has expressed indignation that the country is being
force-marched, through politically correct environmental dogmatism, toward a
future of bicycles, electric cars, veganism, locavores, negative planet-saving
growth and general joylessness — something at a very far cry from stuffing
goose livers for personal delectation.
Doucet, who describes himself as a “flexitarian,” or someone who
favors vegetables but also eats a little meat, argues that the Education
Ministry forced his hand. By doubling social distancing at schools to 2m, it obliged the mayor to accelerate lunch by offering just
one dish.
“There’s a mathematical equation,” he said. “You have the same
number of tables, but you have to put fewer children at them, and you can’t
start the lunch break at 10am”
But why nix meat? The mayor, who has a 7-year-old in elementary
school, rolled his eyes.
“We have not gone to a vegetarian menu! Every day, the children
can eat fish or eggs.” Because a significant number of students already did not
eat meat, he said, “we just took the lowest common denominator.”
It was not, Doucet said, an ideological decision, even if he aims
over his six-year term to adjust school menus toward “a greater share of
vegetable proteins.”
The mayor continued: “Most of the time these days, there’s not
much choice. You don’t have the choice to go to a museum, or to the theater, or
to the cinema. It’s indecent for the right-wing opposition to say that I am
trampling on our liberties in the context of a state of emergency.”
Macron has adopted a balancing act between his embrace of a
Green future and, as he put it last year, his rejection of “the Amish model”
for France. The president tries to differentiate rational from punitive or
extreme environmentalism.
The president, casting his net wide as usual before regional
elections in June, wants to appeal to conservative farmers while attracting
some of the Green vote. During a recent visit to a farm, he attacked attempts
to forge a new agriculture based on “invective, bans and demagoguery.” In an
apparent allusion to the Lyon fiasco, he has said “good sense” should prevail
in balanced children’s diets and noted that, “We lose a lot of time in idiotic
divisions.”
His government has proposed a Constitutional amendment, the
first since 2008, that, if approved in a referendum, would add a sentence to
the effect that France “guarantees the preservation of the environment and
biological diversity and fights against climate change.”
The right has expressed opposition to the change. It still has
to be reviewed by the right-leaning Senate. Another bill sets out possible
reforms for a greener future that include banning advertisements for fossil
fuels and eliminating some short-haul domestic flights.
Doucet is unimpressed.
“Macron is not an ecologist. He is a modern conservative,” he
said. “He knows there’s a problem, so he is ready to make some changes, but he
does not measure the size of the problem. Can you tell me one strong step he
has taken?”
For now, the meatless Lyon school lunches are still being
served. Children seem just fine. Last week, a Lyon administrative court
rejected an attempt by some parents, agricultural unions and local conservative
politicians to overturn the mayor’s decision, ruling that the “temporary
simplification” of school menus did not pose a health risk to children.
.jpg)
.jpg)
