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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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In much of Europe, meat is almost banned in public institutions.

City canteens rarely serve it, university canteens the same. E.g. in Berlin, the limit is one dish with meat per day on 4 different days.

Much of Europe? I think is something that is common only in the most lib part of Berlin where all the americanized women and foreign expats gathers. Here vegetarianism is almost unknown, and also in big cities like Bruxelles I have seen meat everywhere, also in èlites institutions canteens.

There's a Europe-wide initiative to ban meat in large cities in public institutions. Forgot what it's called.

I also saw a Dutch academic complain that his uni also barely serves meat. So it's probably not just Berlin. Go look at I dunno, Hamburg unis.

There's a Europe-wide initiative to ban meat in large cities in public institutions. Forgot what it's called.

You're not talking about one of these WEF-adjacent things (C-40 Cities, etc)? They tend to be aspirational. A lot of cities signed on, but it'll take a while before they get implemented.

I think that's the one. But getting people in big cities to stop using city canteens so they can stop funding them seems like a win/win initiative so it should work out.

Very little of Europe - probably just Berlin, which is the crunchiest city in Continental Europe, driven by some combination of the west Germans who moved there during the Cold War to dodge the draft and the hippies who moved there to take advantage of cheap rents immediately after the Wall came down.

In formerly-Catholic Europe (I have personal experience with France, Spain, Italy and Poland) vegetarianism is seen as a weird Anglosphere perversion (veganism even more so) and the only decent vegetarian food is traditional cuisine-of-the-poor which typically uses cheese as the main protein. A fond memory of my trip to Naples was seeing a solo American female who appeared to be EPLing being shown the door after bothering the only English-speaking waiter about her "intolerances" and being told that there were only three vegetarian items on the menu (two of which were the margherita pizza and the arrabbiata pasta) and she could take or leave them.

Don't know much about German city canteens (??) but Germany has the fourth highest meat consumption per capita in Europe, so I am not convinced that meat consumption is endangered there. Per capita consumption in 2020 was actually higher than in 2017.