Every morning, Marie Dupin slips into the skin of a personality, an event, a place or a fact at the heart of the news.
Spider, hanger steak, chicken thighs and ground beef. According to a survey published a few days ago, the French would always be less likely to put meat on their plate. It’s not new. Last year, they already claimed to eat meat less and less often and put forward health and ecological reasons. This year, it is above all a question of price.
Faced with increasingly expensive meat, more than one in two French people assures them: they would eat less meat than three years ago. And while for years, researchers around the world have been calling for a reduction in meat consumption to limit global warming, we say to ourselves that it may ultimately be inflation that will lower the thermometer.
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A poll contradicted by the figures
The figures for chicken consumption, for example, which have just been published, contradict the survey mentioned above. With a sharp increase in consumption, France is now the leading consumer country of chicken in Europe, with more than 28 kg per person per year. The French today eat twice as much meat as their grandparents. So how to explain this discrepancy between the declarations of the French convinced to eat less meat and the reality?
Quite simply because meat is now consumed without thinking about it. Fewer flank steaks on the plates and Sunday roasts, but still more meat in processed dishes and fast food. Nuggets, cordons bleus, pizzas, sandwiches: raw material meat, cut, packaged, mixed, “deanimalized”…
This is how we went from 3.8 to 5.8 million tonnes of meat consumed each year. However, all the scenarios of national and international agencies advocate a massive reduction in meat consumption to achieve carbon neutrality. Between 30 and 70% reduction… no chance of achieving it at this rate. And while the National Assembly has just rejected a bill for there to be more vegetarian menus in canteens, no strong and immediate action by the public authorities really seems to be on the menu.