Some Netherlands municipalities are showing courage by refusing ads on municipally owned signage venues (such as bus shelters) for climate-damaging products like factory-farmed meat:  Screenshot of headline in NL Times.

Is it time?

Meat, dairy, and eggs, in the industrial high volumes produced today, are bad for health, for justice, and for the planet. Now that some cities and regions have put strong regulations into place minimizing the advertising of harmful products — tobacco, alcohol, and in some places, fossil fuels — should we consider banning, in at least some spaces, ads for the products of animal agriculture?

That's what several cities in the Netherlands are doing. Haarlem, a municipality of 160,000 people just west of Amsterdam, has voted to ban meat advertising in city-owned venues like those bus shelters we stand in when it rains.. Councillors explain that they took the stand for climate reasons, recognizing that making animal-based proteins creates far more greenhouse gases than does making plant-based proteins. It's been a courageous but rocky road for Haarlem’s local government, which heard pushback from Big Meat defenders as well as kudos from citizens for climate leadership. Yet the initiative is moving forward.

Last week, I spoke on the phone with Lodewijk Jurgens, the Dutch civil servant who wrote the policy. Mr. Jurgens said the original idea emerged from city council. Council then heard opinions from stakeholders of all stripes, after which most council members voted in favour of the ban.

The story of Haarlem and its meat advertising ban is one that I shared with attendees this week as a speaker at the Public Health Association of British Columbia’s 2024 conference on the theme of “Commercial Determinants of Health.” We discussed how high-volume industrial meat production, a.k.a. factory farming, is a major commercial influence on personal health, public health, and planetary health. Factory farming is a danger to human well-being, not to mention that it institutionalizes cruelty to animals. And we need to put it higher on our agendas for discourse, for policy — and for more compassionate, ecological, and fair food systems.

A September 2024 Financial Post article (screenshot below) discusses the Hague's move to ban fossil fuel ads — not by policy, but by law.

In my next post: A summary of my 2024 conference presentation to the Public Health Association of B.C.