Cheesy pumpkin quiche and salad is served at a social restaurant in Ghent called Parnassus. The restaurant is set in a former Franciscan church. Photograph: Isabelle Pateer/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Cheesy pumpkin quiche and salad is served at a social restaurant in Ghent called Parnassus. The restaurant is set in a former Franciscan church. Photograph: Isabelle Pateer/The Guardian Euro visions Food Veggie Thursdays and vegan surprises! How Ghent became a plant-based paradise In 2014, 13% of the population of this Belgian city described themselves as flexitarian. This year, 83% did. Here is how everyone was convinced to eat their greens – and love them
Prefer the Guardian on Google S ixty 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?
View image in fullscreen ‘Veggie Thursday’ for schoolchildren in Ghent. Photograph: Isabelle Pateer/The Guardian It didn’t happen overnight. “The success story of Ghent is one where we had an amazing grassroots movement, with people asking for more climate action. 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. “It got the ball rolling, companies and restaurants joined, the population got used to it, and more entrepreneurs made the move to plant-based. 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). “A few years ago, we changed to prioritise plant-based protein,” she says. 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.
View image in fullscreen Hafsa El-Bazioui, right, the Green deputy mayor of Ghent, chats to schoolchildren. Photograph: Isabelle Pateer/The Guardian 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,…