“We’re going to meat country, meat country.” Funny colleagues used the name of the new pro-meat campaign in all kinds of well-known songs and now this mutilation of Paul Simons is Graceland been in my head for a week. Yesterday I also sang: ‘Vleesland, fleshland, oh I long for fleshland’ to the tune of dreamland. And I’ve stopped eating meat for a while now.
How much meat do the Dutch actually eat? It turns out to be about 76 kilos per person per year. This puts us in 37th place in a worldwide ranking. We eat much more meat than, for example, Morocco (35 kilos) or Japan (50 kilos), but less meat than Portugal (94 kilos) or the United States (124 kilos). These numbers are not directly comparable, because this concerns the so-called carcass weight and different countries may eat different percentages of the slaughtered animals.
In the Netherlands, consumers eat about half of a slaughtered animal, which is about 38 kilos per person per year, or about 100 grams per day.
The advice of the Nutrition center is to eat no more than 70 grams of meat per day. The average Dutch person is quite a bit above that. And I think it’s even worse than it seems, because not everyone in the Netherlands is equally enthusiastic about meat country, meat country.
According to the Central Bureau of Statistics about 5 percent of the population does not eat meat. About 45 percent are flexitarians and eat meat no more than four days a week. About 30 percent eat meat five or six days a week and 20 percent every day. The average of 38 kilos per year is for all these people, but the majority of them do not eat meat every day. How much meat do the Dutch eat on average on a day that they eat meat?
For easy calculations I assume that people always eat the same amount of meat on a ‘meat day’, I take the upper limit of four days a week for all flexitarians and the lower limit of five days for the 20 percent who had meat on five or six days. weekly. This brings you to almost 150 grams of meat per day on days when people eat meat. That is more than double the advice for a healthy diet.
And then a campaign to promote meat starts now. While it is so clear that it would be better in every way to eat less meat: for your own health, for the climate and especially for the animals.
Our government removed recommendations to eat less meat from campaigns for sustainability, because that subject turned out to be very sensitive. I once sat at a diner next to a VVD member who gasped that he thought campaigns to eat less meat were ridiculous: if he saw such a call, he immediately went for a kilo banger. I hope that the Vleesland campaign will have a similar unintended effect and that people will eat less meat out of sheer recalcitrance.