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Give us back our steak frites, Paris mayor is told in veggie row

Anne Hidalgo’s plan to feed the city’s council workers vegetarian meals in the name of ecology has split the French left

The vegetarian meals given to Paris’s 51,000 council workers are being touted as a victory in the fight against global warming.

Yet many of the workers do not see it that way. Gardeners, road sweepers and others with outdoor jobs are furious that municipal canteens serve dishes such as broccoli gratin, chilli with vegetables and bulgur wheat or pasta with beans, tomatoes, sweetcorn, onion and garlic. They are demanding a return of the meat dishes that have been removed from council canteen menus on Wednesday and Friday.

The row has highlighted a division in the French left. On one side are largely affluent urbanites keen to challenge France’s entrenched meat-eating tradition in the name of ecology. On the other are working-class employees who remain attached to such classic dishes as steak frites and cordon bleu.

The moderate French Confederation of Christian Workers union denounced the twice-weekly “100 per cent vegetarian days” as the fruit of political correctness and an abuse of power.

“What gives our employer the right to choose what we eat during our lunchtime?” it asked.

Patrick Auffret, a delegate of Force Ouvrière, a left-wing union, was equally upset, describing the vegetarian meals as a source of “irritation for a lot of staff, notably for the gardeners with physical, outside jobs”.

Auffret told Le Parisien that staff would abandon the council’s 15 canteens in favour of cafés and restaurants that served meat, even if they were more expensive.

Changer Paris, a centre-right opposition group in the capital, accused Anne Hidalgo, the city’s Socialist mayor, of an attack on the freedom to choose what to eat.

“What right does Anne Hidalgo have to decide upon the diets of Paris council staff?” it said.

Audrey Pulvar, the assistant mayor in charge of “sustainable food and agriculture”, said the new menus would reduce the city’s carbon footprint, ensure “a better respect of the diversity of diets” and enable canteen operators to save money.

Proponents of vegetarian diets point out that the livestock sector accounts for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Pulvar said the needs of outdoor workers had been considered, and high protein meals were made available, even on vegetarian days. She said she had received only about 40 complaints from staff and denied that they were deserting the canteens in search of meat.

The average French person eats 120kg of meat a year, according to Our World in Data. This compares with an EU average of 104kg a year, and 100kg in the UK, although it is less than the Portuguese, who get through 154kg a year, or the Americans, on 149kg.

Yet meat consumption has fallen in France by 5.8 per cent over the past 20 years, according to the agriculture ministry.

The decline has split the left. In Paris, the mostly upper-middle-class, environmentally conscious voters who form the bedrock of Hidalgo’s support have welcomed the trend. Many expressed support for the MP Sandrine Rousseau when she denounced barbecues as an environmentally damaging tradition perpetuated by red-meat-eating men with sexist values. “They are symbols of virility,” she said, making it plain that virility was not a good quality in her eyes.

But the French Communist Party, which has its roots in working-class France, sprang to the defence of barbecues. It said French workers had the right to have “a good wine, a good meat [and] a good cheese”.

https://www.thetimes.com/world/euro...e-row-sxlmsc8fg