The Danish Government has told all municipalities that older people’s freedom to choose their meals outranks climate policy. The intervention follows months of anger over meat limits in Copenhagen’s care homes.
Minister for Children, the Elderly and Housing Jacob Mark said today he was writing to every council to clarify how the Elderly Act protected residents’ self-determination, public broadcaster DR reported. He said there should be no doubt that free choice came before climate considerations and other municipal policies.
At the centre of the row is Copenhagen’s food and meal strategy, which aimed to cut the climate footprint of the city’s public food purchases by 25 per cent. Its guidelines for care homes recommend no more than 500g of cooked meat per resident a week, of which beef, veal and lamb should make up no more than 80g.
That amounts to roughly 11g of red meat a day. City officials insist the figures are guidance, not rules, but critics say kitchens have treated them as limits.
An analysis carried out for the municipality by auditing firm BDO found residents complaining of poor-quality meat and saying beef rarely appeared on the menu. Newspaper Berlingske reported that some had been refused a beef patty even on their birthdays.
The policy’s defenders have done little to calm tempers. On April 30, councillor Birgitte Kehler Holst of the green party The Alternative opposed exempting care homes, arguing the elderly were perhaps the generation that had done the most climate damage. She later apologised for her wording but not for the policy.
Jens-Kristian Lütken of the liberal Venstre party, the city’s mayor for health and care, wants care homes left out of the next strategy, due to run from 2027 to 2032. He has said many residents live in care homes only briefly and the climate gain from feeding them beans and lentils was barely measurable.
The dispute reached the top in October, when Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats wrote that people who had toiled for their country should be allowed to eat meat. Copenhagen Lord Mayor Sisse Marie Welling of the Green Left (SF) accused her of painting a false picture.
The Danish People’s Party (DF) has gone further, proposing a legal guarantee of meat at least once a day for care home residents and hospital patients.
Copenhagen’s caps are part of a wider drive by left-leaning city halls to steer diets for climate reasons. The city’s children and youth committee backed removing red meat from school and daycare canteens from August 2024, while Amsterdam banned outdoor advertising for meat from May 1.
