LYON – Grégory Doucet, the moderate mayor of the Green Party in Lyon, hardly looks like a revolutionary. But he turned to France when he announced last month that school lunch menus for 29,000 Lyonnais children would no longer include meat.
An outrage! An ecological dictate that can signal the end of French gastronomy, even French culture! The government ministers of President Emmanuel Macron clashed. If Lyon, the city of ox noses and pig ears, saucisson and kidneys, could do this, the apocalypse would certainly be imminent.
“The reaction was quite surprising,” said Doucet, 47.
He is a slight man whose malicious face and goatee give him the air of one of Dumas’s three musketeers. A political neophyte elected last year, he clearly finds it a little ridiculous that he, an apostle of less, ends up with more, sitting under a 25-foot ceiling in a cavernous mayor’s office adorned with brocade and busts of his ancestors. The fact that the local school menu has divided the country leaves him incredulous.
“My decision was purely pragmatic,” he insisted, his eyes shining – a way to speed up lunches in socially distant times, offering a single menu instead of the traditional choice of two dishes.
It is not so, thundered Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister. He tweeted that dropping the meat was an “unacceptable insult to French farmers and butchers” that betrays an “elitist and moralistic” attitude. Julien Denormandie, the Minister of Agriculture, called the mayor’s hug at a meatless lunch “shameful from a social point of view” and “aberrational from a nutritional point of view”.
All of this led Barbara Pompili, the minister of ecological transition, to speak of the “prehistoric” visions, full of “banal clichés” of these men, in fact calling two of her office colleagues Neanderthals.
This heated discussion narrowly illustrated several things. Macron’s government and party, La République en Marche, remain a difficult marriage of the right and left. The growing popularity of the greens, who run not only Lyon, but also Bordeaux and Grenoble, has intensified a cultural conflict between defenders of the urban environment and defenders of the French tradition in the countryside.
Not least, nothing makes the French as dyspeptic as a disagreement over food.
The mayor, it must be said, moved to a city with an intense gastronomic tradition. At the Boucherie François on the banks of the Rhône, a century-old establishment, Lyon’s meat culture is on display. The calf’s liver and kidneys glowed; cuts of roast beef with pork fat abounded; the heads of yellow and white chickens hanging from a counter; the saucissons, some with pistachios, took on all cylindrical shapes; the pâté wrapped in pastry showed a foie gras kernels; and trotters and pig ears betrayed the carnivorous inclinations of this city.
“The mayor made a mistake,” said François Teixeira, a butcher who has worked at François for 19 years. “This is not good for Lyon’s image.”
Certainly, the mayor’s decision came at a delicate time. The right in France expressed outrage that the country is being forced to march, through politically correct environmental dogmatism, towards a future of bicycles, electric cars, veganism, locavores, negative growth to save the planet and general sadness – something very distant filling goose livers for personal delight.
Last year, Pierre Hurmic, the mayor of the Bordeaux Green Party, touched a nerve by rejecting the city’s traditional Christmas tree because it is “a dead tree”. Doucet’s culinary movement was part of “an ideological agenda”, the right-wing weekly Valeurs Actuelles proclaimed in a cover story. “Lyon’s canteens were just a pretext.”
Doucet, who describes himself as a “flexitarian”, or someone who prefers vegetables, but also eats some meat, argues that the Ministry of Education forced him. By doubling the social distance in schools to two meters, or more than six feet, he forced the mayor to speed up lunch by offering only one plate.
“There is a mathematical equation,” he said. “You have the same number of tables, but you have to put fewer children on them and you can’t start your lunch break at 10am”
But why nix meat? The mayor, who has a 7-year-old son in elementary school, rolled his eyes. “We have not opted for a vegetarian menu! Every day, children can eat fish or eggs. “As a significant number of students no longer ate meat, he said,” we just took the lowest common denominator. “
It was not, said Doucet, an ideological decision, even though he aims, over the course of his six-year term, to adjust the school menu to “a greater share of plant protein”.
The mayor continued: “Most of the time, today, there is not much choice. You do not have the option of going to a museum, or to the theater, or to the cinema. It is indecent 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 embracing a green future and, as he said last year, his rejection of the “Amish model” for France. The president tries to differentiate rational environmentalism from punitive or extreme.
The president, launching his network widely before the regional elections in June, wants to attract conservative farmers while attracting some of the green votes. During a recent visit to a farm, he attacked attempts to forge a new agriculture based on “invective, prohibitions and demagogy”. In an apparent allusion to the Lyon fiasco, he said that “common sense” should prevail in balanced children’s diets and noted that “we spend a lot of time in stupid divisions”.
His government has proposed a constitutional amendment, the first since 2008, which, if passed in a referendum, would add a sentence that France “guarantees the preservation of the environment and biological diversity and fights against climate change”.
The right expressed opposition to the change. It still needs to be reviewed by the right-wing Senate. Another bill sets out possible reforms for a greener future, which include banning advertisements for fossil fuels and eliminating some domestic short-haul flights.
Mr. Doucet is not impressed. “Macron is not an ecologist. He is a modern conservative. He knows there is a problem, so he is ready to make some changes, but he does not measure the size of the problem. Can you tell me a strong step he took? “
For now, Lyon’s meatless school lunches are still being served. Children look good. Last week, a Lyon administrative court rejected an attempt by some parents, agricultural unions and local conservative politicians to reverse the mayor’s decision, ruling that “temporary simplification” of school menus did not pose a risk to children’s health.
Doucet says that when the health crisis subsides, but not before, he will be able to offer a choice of school menus again, including meat. Meanwhile, Denormandie, the Minister of Agriculture, asked the mayor of the Lyon region to investigate the legality of dropping the meat.
“Sir. Denormandie’s accusation that we are antisocial is a lie,” Doucet told me. “He said we were denying meat to the poorest and the most precarious, which is false. He should have been fired. at once. “
Boris Charetiers, a member of a parents’ association, said the mayor is being watched closely. “We are vigilant,” he said. “We don’t want it to be a final decision. Our children cannot be held hostage to ecological political convictions ”.
Mr. Teixeira, the butcher, was looking with admiration at the vast selection of meats. “We have canine teeth for a reason,” he said.
Gaëlle Fournier contributed reporting from Paris.