“The meat lobbies are stepping up their efforts to defend their piece of fat even in the classrooms”

Tribune. From kindergarten to high schools, the meat lobbies share the benches of our children throughout their schooling.

According to figures provided by the interprofession of beef, more than 500,000 young people aged 6 to 11 were exposed between 2016 and 2019 to its vast c campaign “At the table with the Joliprés”, available in educational notebooks and holiday notebooks, comics, TV series, posters and other accessories distributed in schools.

Children are the consumers of tomorrow, and their indoctrination starts today

This campaign, alongside the plethora of communications aimed at children deployed each year by the meat trade associations, has in theory a laudable objective: to provide young people with information on food and its link with agriculture. .

But under the guise of pedagogy, the meat lobbies take advantage of a pass in schools and with our children to convey an embellished vision of livestock farming and dispense biased nutritional advice, with a single idea in mind: convince them to consume ever more meat – to the detriment of their health and the environment in which they will grow up.

Yet interventions in public schools are supposed to respect principles of political and philosophical neutrality, and are not supposed to be for profit.

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The long-term investigation that we conducted on the influence practices of the meat lobbies and whose results we are publishing this week demonstrates that the meat interprofessions are redoubling their efforts, creativity and budget to defend their end of fat, even in the classrooms.

Misleading Animation Kits

Even though teachers are struggling to organize school outings, due to lack of resources and time, the meat lobbies are taking advantage of their difficulties to sneak into the daily lives of our children and misinform them. Turnkey school outings aimed at giving a rose-water vision of livestock farming are offered to teachers; nutritionists are commissioned directly by lobbies to carry out interventions in schools, misleading animation kits are distributed to teachers but also to school nurses and doctors…

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It is no coincidence that children are the number one target of lobbies: they are the consumers of tomorrow, and their indoctrination begins today. At the age when thinking is being formed, children do not yet have the keys that would allow them to distinguish false from genuine educational content, especially when this content is so skilfully designed that it is even confusing. more informed audiences such as parents and teachers.

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