“Ghent?!” It’s the city council itself that appends an exclamation mark to the question it asks on its own website, enquiring as to why anyone would want to visit this northern Flemish city of some 240,000 inhabitants which National Geographic’s Traveller Magazine recently ranked as one of the most “authentic” places in the world to visit, beaten into third place only by a pretty valley in Austria and somewhere cold in Canada. Go figure.
And yet Ghent’s councillors have given their city the kind of publicity that is worth its own weight in gold simply by becoming the first town in Europe to declare itself vegetarian for one day every week. The initiative has made column inches in newspapers all over the world.
“We just want to be a city that promotes sustainable and healthy living,” explains Tom Balthazar, a centre-left councillor. The left-liberal local government that controls Ghent’s town hall has been persuaded of the sense of the fresh produce scheme by Philippe Van Den Bulck, a top chef and food writer in Flanders who works at the renowned El Bulli restaurant in Spain and also happens to be a vegetarian. It is reported that he showed councillors that vegetarian food does not need to be boring and unappealing.
So, as part of the scheme, Ghent’s government now insists that local restaurants include vegetarian options on their menus and, every Thursday, do away completely with meat, fish and shellfish. They’ve also set up a scheme whereby local inhabitants can sign up for schemes to source locally-grown produce.
The organisers of the fresh fruits and vegetables-only project see other opportunities too. They say the focus on fresh fruits and vegetables is also designed to reduce the environmental impact of food production, noting the contribution to greenhouse gas emissions by intensive production of meat and dairy products.
“If everyone in Flanders does not eat meat for one day a week, we will save as much carbon dioxide in a year as taking half a million cars off the road,” claims EVA, Flanders’ Ethical Vegetarian Association. Who knows if they’re correct, but it’s the kind of easy parallel that consumers understand.
Not surprisingly, Ghent’s new found focus on fresh fruits and vegetables is arousing interest at home and abroad. It seems other towns in Belgium are keen to set up their own schemes, and people across the border in the Netherlands are also looking at it with great interest.
Time will tell whether the fresh produce-only project can sustain itself after the initial flush of enthusiasm. Although locally-based schemes like this one have a habit of collapsing, the link that has been created to local government suggests it might survive into autumn, winter and beyond. And the region of Flanders produces enough fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the year to keep the local grower-base onside as well as provide enough variety for restaurant menus.
But it’s vital too that Ghent councillors do not lose sight of the fact that their own hinterland is a hugely important first port of entry to large volumes of fresh fruits and vegetables landed at the ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge, two of Europe’s largest fresh produce ports.
At the same time, it has to be hoped that businesses in the local fresh fruit and vegetable trade assist Ghent to make the scheme successful. There is an opportunity here for the development of private-public partnership that ensures only the very best fresh fruits and vegetables are made available to local restaurateurs, wholesalers and retailers. There are surely opportunities too for businesses to support and enhance the initiative with a series of promotions throughout the year.
The Ghent example is also groundbreaking too because of its focus on the city’s adult population, that is to say on those people who go out to eat in restaurants or pay the bills. As has been argued before in this column, one of the downsides of our effort to transform children’s eating habits is that it does not necessarily have a direct impact on the person who makes the buying decisions in every family, namely the parent.
So the willingness of the public authorities actively to encourage new eating habits among their adult populations ought to be applauded. After all, the same individuals who determine what food finds its way onto family dinner tables are the people who also vote politicians in and out of office. Elsewhere, Ghent’s initiative might have failed at the first hurdle because legislators wouldn’t have had the courage to change their voters’ buying habits. But, much as cities like mine have acted to get people out of their cars and onto public transport, it seems they’re now telling us what to eat. And that’s no bad thing.
