Schoolchildren in Freiburg will soon have to eat vegetarian. If you think green, that’s only logical. If you don’t think green, it’s a piece of deprivation of liberty. Or is that too high now?
Freiburg is one of the most beautiful German cities, there is a wealthy bourgeoisie and the Greens have the majority in the city council. During the day you can go mountain biking on adventurous trails in the Black Forest and in the evening in the beer garden of the Feierling brewery in the autumn sun you can munch on a bible cheese with farmhouse bread for 7.50 euros. If you don’t like meat. For meat lovers there is sausage salad. You have the choice here, the traditional house in the old town of Gerberau is a liberal place.
What will soon distinguish it from the schools in Freiburg. Because they may be didactically liberal, we don’t know, when they eat they are green, and in fact twice: soon the children here will lose the freedom to choose between meat and non-meat in the school canteen. If you want to have lunch here, only vegetarian food is served. Because Freiburg wants to become climate-neutral.
Vanessa Carboni was the first in her family to go to college. She became a high school teacher, after seven years she switched to the “Studierendenwerk” in Freiburg as a social officer. In the most recent election, Carboni was the top candidate of the Green Youth, now she is city councilor for education. And celebrates her first success, so to speak. In abstract terms, this consists of thinking about education, agriculture and climate policy together. Which can have very specific consequences.
Eating is no longer an apolitical act. This applies all the more to school meals, simply because a city administration can make political decisions here, even over the will of children and their parents. And because Freiburg is perhaps also Germany’s greenest city in political terms, school lunches are no longer just about whether they are tasty and healthy, but what the consequences of the food are for the climate.
City Councilor Carboni is now pleased that Freiburg, this “Green City”, is playing a “nationwide pioneering role” in making daycare and school meals more climate-friendly. Carboni’s Greens are the largest faction in Freiburg’s municipal council, followed by the Left Alternatives. The green success with the voters in Freiburg reached as far as Berlin. The noble CDU man Matern von Marschall lost his direct mandate to the young Green woman Chantal Kopf in the recent federal election.
City Councilor Carboni says: “We are the first generation to feel the climate crisis firsthand in everyday life, but at the same time the last one who can still avert the worst consequences.” Hence the thing with the school meals. After all, agriculture causes more climate toxins than “the entire transport sector combined” – which is also an opportunity. There is currently a chance that children in Freiburg will (have to) eat vegetarian food at the city schools in the future.
You can also leave it – if the parents spread a sandwich for them in the morning and then cook for them in the evening. However, if the school lunch is their only warm meal of the day, this personal freedom of choice dissolves over the veggie plate. That’s probably why Sebastian Kölsch from the Parents’ Council of the Freiburg schools says that omitting meat is not the problem. But many parents find it a problem, according to Kölsch on SWR, that there is only one court. It comes down to choice.
What is not said publicly, but is obvious: the decision to only eat vegetarian food has another political component. Children from Islamic countries have no religious problem with vegetarian food.
In the first reports on the Freiburg decision, it was said that “cost reasons” were the decisive factor. It goes without saying that it is more expensive for a municipality to offer two meals than just one meal. But the prices of school meals are to rise for parents, at the same time as the organic share, which is to rise from 20 to 30 percent. More organic is a price driver. But: More organic is also due to green thinking.
What can also be seen from the fact that the people of Freiburg flatly ignored a recommendation from Stuttgart. The green-black state government sits in the state capital, with the Food Minister Peter Hauk being a CDU man. He recommended that the schoolchildren in Freiburg should not be dictated to forgo fish and meat. Children should be able to develop their own tastes and that is why meat is part of the diet.
The Christian Democratic minister finds himself on the side of the German Society for Nutrition. The DGE has developed a quality standard for healthy eating in schools based on salad, vegetables, fruit, wholemeal pasta, rice and potatoes. But meat should be on the menu once a week and fish once a week.
Climate-friendly school meals don’t just mean less meat and fish. What you can study in Tübingen, located 150 kilometers north of Freiburg and also governed by the well-known mayor Boris Palmer. From the summer, schools there will be: less meat and fish, more organic, plus: fair trade, less water consumption in food production, no more aluminum trays. Municipal climate neutrality can grow into a far-reaching project.
Tübingen also wants to become climate-neutral by 2030. The examples of Freiburg and Tübingen show that climate policy in Germany is decided at least as much in the individual cities as in large Berlin. And in Brussels, from where German cities that are more ambitious when it comes to climate protection are also given special support.
What happens in Freiburg will also happen elsewhere. The comparatively small but concrete and therefore meaningful topic of school meals shows how this can be done.
Of course, other people will understand differently what the Greens see as enriching, as ecologically necessary and therefore up-to-date: as a state-imposed renunciation of freedom and enjoyment.
