LYON – Grégory Doucet, the gentle green party mayor of Lyon, hardly looks like a revolutionary. But he fueled France by announcing last month that lunch for 29,000 Lyonnais children in primary schools would no longer contain meat.
An outrage! An ecological dictation that could mark the end of French gastronomy, even French culture! Ministers in President Emmanuel Macron’s government clashed. If Lyon, the city of beef and pork, of saucisson and kidneys, could do such a thing, the apocalypse was definitely at hand.
“The reaction was quite astonishing,” Doucet, 47, said.
He is a small man whose mischievous minion and goatee give him the air of one of Dumas’ three musketeers. A political neophyte elected last year clearly finds it a bit ridiculous that he, an apostle of lesser, should sit with more, sitting under a 25-foot ceiling in a hollow mayor’s office decorated with brocade and busts of she disappears. Adapting a local school menu has divided the country, leaving him unbelieving.
“My decision was purely pragmatic,” he insisted, clinking his eyes – a way to speed up lunches in social times by offering a single menu rather than the traditional choice of two dishes.
Not so, thundered Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister. He tweeted that the fall of meat was an “unacceptable insult to French farmers and butchers” that betrayed an “elitist and moralistic” attitude. Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie called the mayor’s embrace of the meatless lunch a disgrace from a social point of view “and ‘aberrational from a nutritional point of view.’
This prompted Barbara Pompili, the Minister of Ecological Transition, to talk about the ‘prehistoric’ views, full of ‘sawed-off clichés’, of these men, whom two of her cabinet colleagues call Neanderthals.
This heated exchange of words illustrates several things. The government and party of Macron, La République and Marche, remain an awkward marriage of right and left. The growing popularity of the Greens, who run not only Lyon but also Bordeaux and Grenoble, intensified a cultural clash between urban environmental crusaders and defenders of the French tradition in the countryside.
Not least, nothing makes the French as dispeptive as disagreement over food.
The mayor, it must be said, has made his move in a city with an intense gastronomic tradition. Lyon’s meat culture is extensively displayed in the Boucherie François on the banks of the Rhône, a centenary business. The calf liver and kidneys shone; slices of roast beef wrapped in lard abundantly; the heads of yellow and white chickens lie on a counter; the sauces, some with pistachios, took on each cylindrical shape; the pastry wrapped pâté flaunts a core of foie gras; and pigs’ runners and ears betrayed this city’s carnivorous tendencies.
“The mayor made a mistake,” said François Teixeira, a butcher who has worked for François for 19 years. “This is not good for the image of Lyon.”
The mayor’s decision certainly came at a sensitive moment. The right in France has expressed outrage that the country is forcibly marching through a politically correct environmental dogma to a future of bicycles, electric cars, veganism, locores, negative planet-saving growth and general unhappiness – something that is far from filling goose liver for personal entertainment.
Last year, Pierre Hurmic, the mayor of the green party of Bordeaux, got nervous when he rejected the city’s traditional Christmas tree because it is a dead tree. “Doucet’s culinary move was part of ‘an ideological agenda’ ‘, the right – wing weekly Valeurs Actuelles announced in a front page story. “The canteen of Lyon was just a pretext.”
Mr. Doucet, who describes himself as a ‘flexitaris’, or someone who prefers vegetables but also eats some meat, argues that the Ministry of Education has forced its hand. By doubling the social distance at schools to two meters, or more than six feet, it forced the mayor to speed up lunch by offering just one dish.
“There’s a mathematical equation,” he said. “You have the same number of tables, but you have to put fewer children in front of it, and you can not start lunch at 10:00.”
But why nix meat? The mayor, who has a 7-year-old in elementary school, rolled his eyes. ‘We did not go to a vegetarian menu! The children can eat fish or eggs every day. “Because a significant number of students had not already eaten meat, he said: ‘we only took the lowest common denominator.’
Mr. Doucet said it was not an ideological decision, even if during his six-year term he aims to adapt school choice lines for a larger share of vegetable proteins.
The mayor continues: ‘There is not much choice these days. You do not have the choice to go to a museum, theater or cinema. It is obscene for the right-wing opposition to say that I am trampling on our freedoms in the context of a state of emergency. ”
Mr. Macron adopted a balancing act between his embrace of a green future and, as he put it last year, his rejection of ‘the Amish model’ for France. The president tries to rationally distinguish from punishment or extreme environmental awareness.
The president, who as usual is throwing hiss just before the local elections in June, wants to appeal to conservative farmers while drawing some of the Green votes. During a recent visit to a farm, he made efforts to forge a new agriculture based on ‘invective, bans and demagoguery’. In an apparent allusion to the Lyon fiasco, he said “good sense” should prevail in balanced children’s diets and noted that “we are wasting a lot of time in idiotic divisions.”
His government proposed a constitutional amendment, the first since 2008, which, if approved in a referendum, would add a sentence that France ‘guarantees the preservation of the environment and biodiversity and fights climate change’.
The right wing expressed its opposition to the change. It has yet to be reviewed by the jurist Senate. Another bill sets out possible reforms for a greener future that include banning advertising for fossil fuels and eliminating short-term domestic flights.
Mr. Doucet was not impressed. Macron is not an ecologist. He is a modern conservative. He knows there is a problem, so he is ready to make changes, but he does not measure the size of the problem. Can you give me one strong step he took? ‘
For now, the meatless Lyon lunches are still served. Children do not look good. Last week, a court in Lyon rejected an attempt by some parents, agricultural unions and local conservative politicians to overturn the mayor’s decision, ruling that the “temporary simplification” of school menus poses no health risk to children does not hold.
Mr. Doucet says that when the health crisis eases, but not before, he could once again offer a choice of school menus, including meat. Meanwhile, Mr. Denormandie, the Minister of Agriculture, asked the prefect in the Lyon area to investigate the legality of the fall of meat.
“Mr. Denormandie’s accusation that we are antisocial is a lie,” Mr Doucet told me. “He said we deny the poorest people with the most uncertain existence meat, which is false. He had to immediately have been dismissed. “
Boris Charetiers, a member of a parent association, said the mayor is being closely monitored. “We are vigilant,” he said. “We do not want it to be a definite decision. Our children cannot be held hostage to ecological political persuasion. ”
What mr. As for Teixeira, the butcher, he expressed his appreciation for the large variety of meats. “We have dog teeth for a reason,” he said.
Gaëlle Fournier reported from Paris.