Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by takyon on Friday February 24 2017, @07:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-in-America dept.

Clearly Veg reports:

Barbara Hendricks, Germany's environment minister, has banned meat in all official functions and called for only vegetarian food to be served. The ban became clear through an email "to department heads from a senior civil servant in the environment ministry", according to The Telegraph . The e-mail noted that the ministry had a responsibility and should set an example to combat the "negative effects of meat consumption", with a statement by the ministry reading:

"We're not telling anyone what they should eat. But we want to set a good example for climate protection, because vegetarian food is more climate-friendly than meat and fish."

Unsurprisingly, the ban has caused a lot of controversy. Minister of food and agriculture Christian Schmidt, who has previously stated that he will push for a ban on "misleading" vegan labels such as vegan curry sausages, stated that he will not be having this "Veggie Day through the back door", and that "meat and fish are also part of a balanced diet".


[Ed Note: This submission vandalized by cmn32480.]

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday February 24 2017, @08:05PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday February 24 2017, @08:05PM (#471293) Journal

    Well, at one time Eskimo, or possibly it was Inuit, diet consisted solely of meat for about 6-8 months out of the year. (IIUC, this only works if you eat raw fish guts.) And Scandinavian traditional crusine was in places heavily meat/fish based.

    Being "heavy" on the meat/fish or even having it exclusively for part of the year isn't quite the same as requiring it at every meal.

    In pre-refirgeration times there were people who practiced conspicuous consumption by having meat at every meat (because you couldn't save it very long).

    Yeah, that's simply not true. The very fact that you had to literally slaughter an animal and consume it quickly meant that meat was a rarer thing, particularly in post-agricultural societies. You kept your cows and chickens and goats and sheep for their milk and eggs and wool and such; killing them wasn't something you could generally afford to do unless you were blessed with lots of extra animals around. There's a reason the Bible makes such a big deal about how they "killed the fatted calf" when the Prodigal Son returns: it was an unusual thing done for special feast, not a daily occurrence.

    And actually, there were plenty of ways to preserve meat before refrigeration. Just a few that immediately come to mind: Drying, smoking, curing with salt or brine, using a "confit" system by cooking and preserving food anaerobically under congealed fat, and of course in some of the Scandinavian and Inuit cultures you actually mention, there were methods of fermentation and treatment with harsher chemicals (like lye). To this day, Alaska has by far the highest number of botulism cases compared to its population in the U.S., due to the use of traditional meat preservation techniques (some of which obviously don't actually work so well, but that's what people used to do to survive).

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:08AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:08AM (#471389) Journal

    I believe I did state "conspicuous consumption". It wasn't something the common folk could do, but a Roman Emperor or a French King could do it...and some of them did. I wouldn't swear that there weren't any Barons or Merchant Princes that did it, either.

    P.S.: There *were* ways of preserving meat so that it didn't need to be eaten immediately, but those weren't used in "conspicuous consumption". Salt pork, various jerkeys, etc. The Romans pickled dormouse in honey, but I'm not sure that doesn't count as "conspicuous consumption" even though it preserved the meat, because honey was quite extravagantly expensive. (At least during the middle ages they didn't know how to harvest the honey without destroying the hive...if not the bees, at least the place they called home.)

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.