My veins constrict when I hear the great orator Van Quickenborne talk about animal welfare in the constitution

You may have already suspected this, based on the pale complexion of the portrait that accompanies these pieces, but I could do with eating a few more vegetables. I eat them, yes, and I don’t even have to tear them away from the pleasant embrace that the bread, the meat and a ladle of Devos Lemmens offer, but their quality is such that I recently turned to a leaf to find one of my own. columns I think I have read.

Nearly twenty years have passed since I got mine tellor baptized in vegetarianism. At that time, in addition to the real stuff, you had two types of vegetable burgers: the cheap version, which was reminiscent of an old saddle in taste and texture, and the expensive one from Iglo, consisting of broccoli, carrots, corn and insulating foam, all united in one crispy crepi crust.

Of the fifteen months that I have been a vegetarian, I have spent fourteen of them on the toilet.

So I haven’t lost a fanatic. I grant meat eaters their barbarism just as I grant vegetarians a meal without being asked five times whether they are sure that they really shouldn’t have a piece of meat. However, that does not mean that people can just do whatever they want with my evening meal. Unnecessary animal suffering makes a meal so much less happy.

My veins start to swell when I hear the great orator Vincent Van Quickenborne call the inclusion of animal welfare in the constitution a ‘life-threatening decision’. According to the country’s most famous air guitarist, this could lead to ‘activist judges’ soon ruling that we can no longer eat meat. Have the livestock farms around Kortrijk been checked for Creutzfeldt-Jakob recently?

What do you mean, life-threatening? Because eating animals that have not had dioxins or insecticides such as nitrofen or fipronil added to their feed poses a threat to health? What do you mean, activist judges? Is he referring to the long-haired, Marx and Engels-quoting, harem-pants and cannabis-wearing magistrates who sent the Reuzegommers home with little more than a pat on the head?

And what if all those activist judges indeed decided that we could no longer eat meat? As if the country goes up in flames when something is imposed on the people from above that they do not want. How many people want to drive a maximum of 120 kilometers per hour on the highway, or 30 in a village center? How many want Euro standards for their cars? How many want to give half their wages to taxes?

Not one judge will decide in the next five hundred years that eating meat is prohibited, not as long as cigarettes and alcohol are freely sold. That would mean progress, and we still have more than enough politicians to stop it.