Sixty bowls of slime-green soup sit waiting for the children to arrive. Pupils rush in from their morning lessons, grab the bowls by the handles and start slurping. No complaints, no refusals. (OK, maybe a few “bleurgh” faces.) Chicory soup dispatched, they get stuck into the main course: falafel, Mediterranean vegetable tagine and couscous.
Some ask for seconds; most grab a piece of fruit for dessert and run out to play. This is a typical Thursday lunchtime in BS De Stadspoort primary school in Ghent, Belgium. Similar meat-free menus are being eaten in other schools and nurseries across the city, plus community centres, care homes and assisted living facilities, not to mention many work canteens and restaurants.
Thursday in Ghent is officially “Veggie Day”, with residents encouraged to eschew any meat or fish. So how did a city get its children – and everyone else – to eat their greens? It didn’t happen overnight.
But the magic happened when politicians actually listened and implemented policy to introduce the Thursday Veggie Day in 2009,” says Vanessa Debruyne, the head of communications for the nonprofit organisation ProVeg Belgium, who is showing me around town. We’ve been unstoppable ever since! Ghent is the best town in Belgium for plant-based food.” Veggie day was just the start, agrees Hafsa El-Bazioui, the Green deputy mayor of Ghent, who has cycled over to join us (the city centre has been largely car-free since 2017).
In 2021, the Flemish government launched the Green Deal Protein Shift – a commitment to switch the ratio of animal to plant proteins consumed from 60:40 to 40:60 by 2030. Ghent has already reached the target. As well as vegetarian Thursdays and vegetarian options every day, school caterers have turned traditional meat dishes such as burgers, sausages and meatballs into hybrids, cutting out at least half the beef or pork and replacing them with, say, lentils.
Stews might combine meat with chickpeas or beans. An incredible amount of effort is put in to making each dish taste good: they are screened by a “taste panel” made up of dietitians, chefs, childcare professionals and people with sensitivities to flavour, bitterness, texture and mouthfeel. Recipes are constantly modified and improved after feedback from children, parents and school staff.
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