The date is 10th September 2014 and, having just finished writing an entry for this very blog, the 'Publish' button is clicked and the words sail off across the Internet. Here's a link to what was written. The subject was vegetarianism, which for reasons I then explained was not a word I was comfortable using to describe our eating habits, hence the chosen title 'Neither meat nor fish'. So why should this topic be one to return to now? Perhaps it is because having spent many weeks on the road, passing through first England then Holland, Belgium and on into France, we are now in a position to reveal our revised and updated views on how each of these countries regards our long standing dietary preference.
Whatever your point of view, there is little denying that the last five years or so has been a period during which interest and concern about the impacts of meat eating as part of the human diet has heightened. Already, farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction and the global loss of wildlife. It is responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that’s happened this century, beef production being the leading cause of deforestation in tropical rainforests. Roughly half the calories farmers grow are now fed to livestock, and the demand for animal products is rising fast. Livestock farming has an impact on the environment and thus ultimately upon world's climate. In other words, climate change and the impact humans are having on this are now being directly linked to, amongst other things, our consumption of meat. Arable farming is more productive per acre than livestock farming, or to put this another way, we could feed the world using only a fraction of the space we do now, leaving more wild areas where nature can do its thing.
Here's another couple of interesting factoids:
- Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is poultry.
- Just 4% of the world’s mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%.
So has this knowledge given rise to any changes in people's eating habits, their diet, or their way of life?
Let us begin with the UK in general (there being no discernible difference between our home nations so far as we can tell) where even in the last year or so we have noticed some changes. In supermarkets now there is often a section entirely devoted to vegetarian foods, quorn based products, plant based sausages, mince, etc., plenty of choice and mostly marked with a little 'V' so that there's no need to scan the ingredients for hidden meatiness. Meat consumption in the UK fell by 17% in the decade up to 2019 and this is reflected in some of our own shopping experiences. Perhaps the only criticism might be that there is increasing confusion over the use of the word 'vegan' when referring to anything that is meat free. We eat both eggs and cheese as well as drinking milk and none of these items would figure in a vegan diet.
So the UK is getting the message then, what about Holland? Here the picture seems similar - marked products in larger grocery stores - and we were taken to a vegetarian restaurant in Rotterdam, which means at least one exists. Some research seems to show that although meat consumption is increasing, after a lull over the last decade, the increase has been in other meats and less in beef.
Belgium is a strange country, in our experience, in that the culture depends upon whether you are in the Dutch or the French bit, so we can probably assume meat eating habits will follow cultural stereotyping. We had an interesting discussion with a young lady serving us in a small Belgian restaurant who explained that her country has a number of regional authorities (governments?) who barely talk to each other and probably don't even speak each other's language. She in turn was interested in the distinction between the UK and Great Britain, something we had to admit we could not explain, but clearly there are similarities in the way our respective countries are governed.
Moving on to France then, have eating habits changed here since we last visited, so far as we can tell? The simple answer is no, not at all. We encounter a strange look at a boulangerie sandwich counter when we ask for something vegetarian and finally when we were offered a salad filled wrap it seemed like the assistant was only too delighted to get rid of her last one, and after eating it we could understand why - it was ghastly! As to grocery stores, we tried many but struggled to find anything vegetarian, despite optimistically scanning the product ingredients, many times. This even applied to the offerings of so called 'international' stores like Lidl or Aldi. It seems then that, from a vegetarian perspective, the French are way behind us and somehow, sadly, we expected nothing more than what we found here. This contradicts, to an extent, the official figures which show that meat consumption in France is declining but if this is so then we cannot help but feel sorry for the vegetarians who live here and find it difficult to buy what they want. (The Spanish, incidentally, top both the meat and the fish eating league tables.)
There we have it then. Just our views, of course, and we fully accept we might be proved wrong but it seems, after all, that we might be living in the country best suited to our needs.
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