It is not so long ago when Roland Barthes wrote, in his Mythologies (Threshold), in 1957: “Like wine, steak is, in France, a basic element, nationalized even more than socialized; it appears in all the decorations of food life. » However, if the meat, red in particular, remains perhaps “in all settings”, it is no longer obvious. Long seen as a guarantee of good health, in excess, it is now singled out. And criticized in the name of the fight against climate change.
To achieve carbon neutrality in 2050, France, for sure, will have to eat less meat, a drop varying from 20% to 70% depending on the scenario. Even the Court of Auditors, guardian of public finances, recommended, in May, to reduce the number of cows in France to meet national climate commitments.
If the state apparatus seizes the subject, in politics, few are those who risk criticizing meat consumption in France, twice the world average. Too afraid to be accused of“fuck the French”, according to the formula of President Georges Pompidou, on a food also loaded symbolically. A part of the left seizes it, certainly. There are the abolitionists, like Aymeric Caron, deputy (Ecological revolution for the living) of Paris, member of the group La France insoumise at the National Assembly. The ecologist deputy from Paris Sandrine Rousseau, too, each with their arguments.
But the rest of the political leaders go there with tweezers, when they do not engage, on the contrary, in an opposite niche, that of the defense of meat. Bruno Le Maire, in May, visited a vegetable merguez sausage factory and other ultra-processed substitute products. Not without giving guarantees of love for real meat: “I love to eat a good steak and I don’t like the ultras who say you have to stop meat completely. » After leading his presidential campaign around meat in 2022, with a visit to a butcher school and defending the Place de la “good meat” in the French meal, the communist Fabien Roussel put forward, this summer, other markers of popular authenticity: he filmed himself seated at his Corsican campsite, preparing a herring salad.
“French way of life”
A bit like the car, meat is now at the heart of a cultural conflict that is all the more sensitive in that it affects lifestyles. “On meat, I assume to lead a cultural battledeclares Sandrine Rousseau, it is the most effective and easiest individual action one can take to reduce one’s carbon footprint. Whether rural or urban, in a single parent family or not, everyone can do it. » Despite health and scientific arguments, the resistance is there. “We cannot claim that the fight against global warming is consensual as some claim, at least I manage to highlight this resistance”continues the deputy.
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