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Veggie France?


NormanH
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Good luck with that. Our daughter decided she wanted to be a vegetarian so we accommodated her preferences at home. Six months later she went to Aix en Provence Uni to further her French studies and found it was completely impossible to carry on with a Veggie regime. I worked in an industry that every day always had a vegetarian option on the menu for lunch, I very often would eat it and indeed enjoyed it. What I do find annoying about most Vegetarians is that when they come to peoples homes to eat, nearly always their diet is respected, unfortunately, it doesn't often work the other way round. I think the French idea of a Vegetarian meal is to scrape the meat off the plate. ???
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I have been privileged to enter the Grotte of Altamira - exceptional! I have been in some other caves with ancient paintings. Lascaux is only available at distance on the internet. I have never seen a single fruit or vegetable - only meat!

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NickP wrote the following post at 29 May 2021 18:37:

What I do find annoying about most Vegetarians is that when they come to peoples homes to eat, nearly always their diet is respected, unfortunately, it doesn't often work the other way round. I think the French idea of a Vegetarian meal is to scrape the meat off the plate.

Being an almost veggie .. I eat some fish and some fowl but mostly veggie ..

So I can sympathise with your post.

In the beginning of our life here some 16 years ago I found much incomprehension of my food preferences.

So a simple salad would come with lardons on top, or a herb omelet would have ham in it or on it.

Fish often came wrapped in some meaty delight somehow .. even tho I'd say that I didn't want ham wrapped around my asparagus, somehow it arrived like that even so.

Things are much easier these days .. especially the last year when 95% of the time we have eaten at home ???
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We have a veggie friend who will eat fish if need be,a nd so often in Fracne it had to be thus. The nearest they can offer is often an omelette, especailly in meat based restaurants, and indeed you are lucky if you find an unadulterated omelette served.  Happily he loves cheese, so I can always feed him cheese instead!

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I am not sure if the details in the OP have really sunk in:

"The climate and resilience bill, now under

examination by the higher chamber of the French parliament, includes:

one compulsory vegetarian menu a week in all schools; one daily

vegetarian choice in all state-run canteens, including government

establishments and universities
; training for canteen staff to guarantee

high-quality vegetarian menus; and the stipulation that from 2024, 60%

of the meat served in mass catering must meet minimum quality

requirements, which are likely to favour meat produced in France over

imports.Pompili said the changes would boost French farming by emphasising local food, while reducing carbon"

I live in a town where it is easy to find vegetarian options, and like NickP  I often find them delicious, which in my opinion is the best way to encourage people to eat them

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Actually, even here in the rural, rural countryside, and even in the smallest and remotest restos, they seem to do, if not vegetarian, at least no-meat.

Used to be a nightmare, eating out with OH and even worse, eating out with OH in someone's home. But now, things are a-changing.

Our resto, only now tentatively re-opening do a veggie option and we have new French neighbours who are opening a resto in a nearby village who, on being questioned, said he would certainly be offering a veggie option.

All this is of huge relief to me because then, when I am away next month and in hospital in July, I have a choice of restos from which to order meals for OH. Just great....no more need to cook piles of stuff in advance, stock up the freezer so that he will not survive purely on cheese sandwiches.

Bring it on, I say, because I myself is at least 90% of the time non-meat. Never thought I'd adapt but I suppose you can never say never?
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More worrying are the official figures (from, I think, Eurostat, but I can't lay my hands on them now) that showed that in the past decade EU countries (inc. UK for those stats) have lost between 25-50% of all farms. France was round about the 50ù loss mark. However, there was no loss of food production. That, of course, means that many, many small local farms have been replaced by a few large industrial ones (just like in USA, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, ...). But France? Oh my! Thank god our département seems to have resisted, at least comparatively.
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Big does not necessarily mean large industrial production. Many small farms were a social nightmare, uneconomic, relying on handouts, unhygienic,

Much countryside does not lend itself to huge, sterile fields.

There is still a space for small specialised farms where one or the other family member has a job elsewhere.
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