Citing ‘anti-meat’ sentiment, butchers seek protection
PARIS— French butchers say they’ve had enough. Not only must they confront media coverage of the “vegan way of life,” now they say they are under assault.
After a series of small but unprecedented incidents, the butchers federation says its members need protection from militants who have broken windows, thrown fake blood and sprayed graffiti on their shops. In a letter to the French Interior Ministry, the butchers wrote that “physical, verbal, and moral violence” against them was “neither more nor less than a form of terrorism.”
The letter may be a touch hyperbolic — and French vegan organizations are quick to defend their movement as nonviolent — but it has struck a chord with many French who dislike being told what they should eat.
Food is sacred in France, a country proud of its more than 300 cheeses and cuts of beef so refined that it is impossible to order a steak at the butcher without being offered a choice of at least 10 cuts.
“The enemies of a meat-based diet want to consign humanity to grains,” a columnist wrote this week in the newsmagazine Le Point. “Down with totalitarianism. Long live blanquette.”
Butchers in different parts of the country have been targeted recently with fake blood by antimeat or animal-rights groups. In the northeastern city of Lille and the surrounding region, vandals shattered widows and left graffiti saying “Stop Speciesism” on a butcher’s shop, a fishmonger, a restaurant and a rotisserie.
“Attacks like this, acts of violence against businesses are new in France,” said Pierre Sans, a veterinary professor at the University of Toulouse who also studies food consumption. “We have seen it against slaughterhouses and lab- oratories, but towards a business that is selling legal foodstuffs, it’s rather shocking.”
The attacks not only have taken the butchers by surprise, but also have offended them, perhaps in part because the village butcher, like the baker and the cheese proprietor, tends to be a respected community member.
The butchers’ letter comes against a backdrop of a gradual fall in meat consumption in France that has been driven by many factors: health concerns, higher prices and a general sense of the cost of meat to the environment.
Still, it hardly seems likely that vegans are about to carry the day. France remains the highest percapita consumer of red meat in Europe, and it leads the world in the manufacture of foie gras, a favourite Christmas delicacy made from the liver of a force-fed goose or duck.