Let Them Eat Crickets!

France has a long history of well-heeled elites telling other Frenchmen how to live. These days, those prescriptions mostly have to do with the environment. Or that is the claim, anyway. So the Mayor of Paris wants municipal employees not to eat so much meat:

The vegetarian meals given to Paris’s 51,000 council workers are being touted as a victory in the fight against global warming.

Yet many of the workers do not see it that way. Gardeners, road sweepers and others with outdoor jobs are furious that municipal canteens serve dishes such as broccoli gratin, chilli with vegetables and bulgur wheat or pasta with beans, tomatoes, sweetcorn, onion and garlic. They are demanding a return of the meat dishes that have been removed from council canteen menus on Wednesday and Friday.

Why are the liberals doing it?

Audrey Pulvar, the assistant mayor in charge of “sustainable food and agriculture”, said the new menus would reduce the city’s carbon footprint, ensure “a better respect of the diversity of diets” and enable canteen operators to save money.

You could laugh at the fact that the Mayor’s office has someone in charge of “sustainable food and agriculture,” but you shouldn’t: this is where the rubber meets the road. Do you want to eat meat, or bugs? Broccoli today, crickets and mealworms tomorrow.

Happily, Paris’s anti-meat campaign is generating a lot of opposition:

The row has highlighted a division in the French left. On one side are largely affluent urbanites keen to challenge France’s entrenched meat-eating tradition in the name of ecology. On the other are working-class employees who remain attached to such classic dishes as steak frites and cordon bleu.

The moderate French Confederation of Christian Workers union denounced the twice-weekly “100 per cent vegetarian days” as the fruit of political correctness and an abuse of power.
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Changer Paris, a centre-right opposition group in the capital, accused Anne Hidalgo, the city’s Socialist mayor, of an attack on the freedom to choose what to eat.

“What right does Anne Hidalgo have to decide upon the diets of Paris council staff?” it said.

Good question! Even the Communists are getting this one right. Barbecues have become a flash point:

In Paris, the mostly upper-middle-class, environmentally conscious voters who form the bedrock of Hidalgo’s support have welcomed the trend. Many expressed support for the MP Sandrine Rousseau when she denounced barbecues as an environmentally damaging tradition perpetuated by red-meat-eating men with sexist values. “They are symbols of virility,” she said, making it plain that virility was not a good quality in her eyes.

But the French Communist Party, which has its roots in working-class France, sprang to the defence of barbecues. It said French workers had the right to have “a good wine, a good meat [and] a good cheese”.

Here in the U.S. barbecues will be under attack soon, if they are not already. The Left hates enjoyment of all forms, including dietary. They want you (not them) to eat bugs, not steaks and pork chops. They claim it is about the environment, but that makes no sense: really, it is just about the Left’s eternal lust for power over the rest of us. Don’t let them get away with it.