Lyon’s city council has moved to take animal flesh off school menus, sparking a debate that touches on many issues ranging from the political to the environmental and of course the ethical. We take a look at the arguments and other examples of moves by schools to switch to more sustainable mealtimes.

If you were to name a city or even a country that you thought would be more likely to switch its schoolchildren away from eating meat, Lyon in France - named the world capital of gastronomy for the past 35 years - probably wouldn’t top the list. With a third as many Michelin-starred restaurants as London, despite being 16 times smaller by population, food is huge in Lyon. So for its council to scrap animal flesh from school menus, that is really something to drill down into.

As reported by the Guardian yesterday, the decision by Lyon’s Green-controlled council would at first glance appear to be more a logistical one, saying “physical distancing rules necessitated more sittings in school canteens and it could not serve 29,000 children in two hours if there was a choice of meat and vegetarian menus”.

But producers and France’s farming lobby are not buying it, reacting angrily to a perceived green leftwing agenda. This is where it becomes political, as Lyon’s previous rightwing mayor Gérard Collomb also did the same thing at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last year. Critics from France’s national administration have also weighed in, such as agriculture minister, Julien Denormandie, who told French radio that it was “absurd from a nutritional point of view, and a scandal from a social point of view”.

So why the furore? We can only explain away so much of the political criticism as point-scoring and posturing by a centrist government against green leftists, who have experienced something of a surge in popularity in recent years due to growing concerns about the environment.

Animal agriculture and meat production, in particular, has been a central issue and demonised quite rightly by a broad range of campaign groups and organisations. From environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), to think tanks like Chatham House that advise governments and corporations directly, all are saying that we must move away from animals in our daily diets. It is only the degree to which the point is pushed that differs, with most taking the more temperate line of having meat-free Mondays and other such half-measures.

It would seem that the Lyon decision has struck a raw nerve. French farmers - who we saw protesting the council’s decision by descending upon city hall with tractors and animals in tow as if seeing a live cow would make a politician change their mind about killing them and offering them up to school children - will be feeling under attack like in any country where growing environmental concerns have found their way into the political agenda. Those who lobby for animal agriculture will be putting more money into convincing politicians not to support any changes in legislation or indeed any political move to stifle meat consumption, feeling the threat of inevitability. Meat is still widely consumed, we are a long way off from purely plant-based societies, yet the resistance is strong as trends show veganism, vegetarianism and flexitarianism to be more prevalent in the younger generations.

This means that eating animals could have a generational shelf life, or in other more blunt words, it could die out with older people. This brings us nicely back to why it is so important that children should have meat-free meals normalised, and why a child should see their friends and those around them at an early age make conscious informed food choices.

School is one place where we learn many of our social norms. According to MeatFreeMondays.com, writing about a PETA-led joint campaign to reform school meals, the UK’s school food standards stipulate that children must be served flesh three days a week, oily fish once every three weeks, and dairy every weekday, thus “setting a dietary pattern for adult life”.

“As long as the mandatory animal-derived food servings remain in the standards, caterers are restricted in meeting the demand for sustainable, healthy meals,” said PETA’s Carys Bennett. “Government guidelines should certainly not require schools to offer foods that are wrecking the climate and fuelling the childhood obesity crisis.”

We know that eating animals is linked to a range of health issues, being high in saturated fat and cholesterol while red and processed meats are known carcinogens. Conversely, properly planned vegan diets are appropriate for all stages of life, according to both the British and American Dietetics Associations. The idea that animals are essential for children is outdated and even dangerous.

The message appears to be getting through with plenty of examples of schools certainly in the UK moving away from animal products or at least offering better options for vegan and veggie children, mainly driven by health and environmental arguments. Examples include 200 primary schools in Leeds and an interesting case in Manchester where a vegan mother successfully campaigned for school meals for her child based on the fact that veganism is protected under the Human Rights Act, which takes much from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Resistance from other parents is strong, but predictably so, driven by strong social and cultural conditioning and those early-life patterns to which we have all been exposed. For parents to realise that animals should not be part of any child’s diet means them facing up to many uncomfortable truths, just like anyone who has participated in the needless deaths of countless animals for most of their lives. The ethical argument is the hardest to get around, making it the strongest, yet it is also the one on which most people simply shut down.

But unless there is a dramatic reversal in the way our climate is going or new science that shows that eating plants will cause more health problems than eating animals - neither of which will happen - it is only a matter of time before the world changes or rather is forced to change as health services struggle to cope with growing public health pressures and food production suffers amid increasingly hostile conditions.

So, why is a political kerfuffle in Lyon over school meals so important? Because unless we do plant those seeds of change at a young age, today’s children will be tomorrow’s adults dealing with a world that none of us today would recognise. Children must become aware of every consequence that comes with what, or rather who, they have on their plates.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager at Surge.

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