While the Netherlands has its hands full with the coming (financial) crisis, is racking its brains over the feasibility of the climate agreement, improving animal welfare and getting our society preventively healthier, yet again tens of millions have just been allocated at the European level to an initiative that is completely at odds with this.
Despite meat production being responsible for **[more than 12 percent of CO2 emissions](Eating https://nos.nl/artikel/2220696-hoe-slecht-is-vlees-echt-voor-het-milieu.html#:~:text=Eén kilograms of beef is,equivalent to driving 180 kilometers by car.&text=Meat consumption is one of the,reduction of land and water use.)**, the meat industry still involves unprecedented animal suffering and eating too much meat is associated with **[diabetes 2, strokes and cancer](https://www.voedingscentrum.nl/encyclopedie/vlees.aspx#:~:text=Het eating too much,Therefore, eat meat in moderation.)**, it was nevertheless chosen at this very moment to reinstate subsidies from tens of millions attribute to the promotion of meat consumption.
Let me first emphasize that I too just eat meat, fish and eggs and am therefore not anti. But why, note in this day and age, fat subsidies must be handed out to promote the already questionable meat industry is completely unclear to me.
The substantiation from CDA MEP Annie Schreijer-Pierik, for example, is as evasive as it is meaningless: "The European Union should not interfere with the food choices of citizens." In my opinion, aren't you actually interfering with food choice when you promote that particular food?
Contrastingly, she does worry about the other idiocy that has been going on for some time: the naming of the healthier and environmentally friendly(er) meat substitutes as Accept Gyros and the Vega Burger. Her argument is that this would be misleading. After all, you could easily make a mistake and not realize that you are consuming a more sustainable alternative. Granted, you really don't taste the difference these days.
Schreijer-Pierik would be better off worrying about the overall popular manipulation where producers are allowed to structurally lie to us about what is actual in a product. Witness the legion of examples where you think you are buying something (since that is what it is called), but what is only minimally in it. Or not at all. Hummus with only 37 percent chickpeas (the main ingredient) or truffle oil using only a residual petroleum product that is happens to taste like truffle.
Incidentally, this situation is not isolated. The creation of the National Prevention Agreement which was created in 2018 to combat overweight and obesity, among other things, reads like a exciting book and is peppered with questionable twists and turns.
Despite, for example, higher taxes on sugary products, the sugar tax, in abroad has proven to be an extremely successful tool in the fight against overweight and obesity, it just doesn't get off the ground in the Netherlands. For example, there was plenty of talk here about a variant of the sugar tax, namely: the soft drink tax.
Well, a reverse tax then. Instead of higher taxes on sugary drinks, instead water and sugar-free drinks would be 9 cents per liter become cheaper. That this reverse soft drink tax never saw the light of day was to be expected. Not just because of the lobby, but all the more so because a proposal that only costs the government money (less tax on sugar-free beverages) instead of making money (additional tax on sugary beverages) has little chance of success.
Moreover, the entire documentation regarding the Prevention Agreement, which should simply be public, is quite difficult to retrieve, journalistic platform found Follow The Money.
So even though a majority of the Netherlands, but also various city councils healthier diet note, health care costs, in part because of our (unhealthy) lifestyles over the next 20 years almost double and Dutch scientists and athletes are practically screaming for a healthier lifestyle, it still seems a challenge for our government to really get anything done.
She obviously saw this coming much earlier. The government therefore absolves itself of any responsibility in advance, as evidenced by its now 30-year campaign: A better environment starts with yourself. So does a healthier lifestyle.
