Politician calls for daily vegan menus in Welsh schools ‘Recycle peelings, not plastic,’ says Joyce

Schools in Wales should offer vegan meals every day without pupils having to make special requests, a politician has argued.

In a debate on healthy school meals at the National Assembly for Wales on Wednesday (15 May), Labour’s Joyce Watson argued that children have a right to plant-based options.

Mrs Watson said:

“Vegans in the UK have the right to suitable plant-based catering under human rights and equality law.

“I’d like to see tasty, nutritious, appropriate vegan meals on daily menus.”

Under the Human Rights Act and Equality Act 2010, vegans have the right to live according to their moral convictions and must not be discriminated against.

Following a human rights challenge led by the campaign group Go Vegan World, Scottish education authorities this week announced they will provide vegan options. In 2018, a mother in Manchester won her fight to get free vegan lunches served at her daughter’s school by citing equality laws. Laura Chepner’s request was initially refused because, the school said, her daughter’s dietary requirements were a ‘lifestyle choice’, not the result of religion or allergy.

Mrs Watson, who sits on the Assembly’s Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs committee, said serving more vegan meals could improve children’s health and respond to young people’s concerns about climate change. She continued:

“School meals play an important role in our children’s health, development and their future choices.

“Research has linked vegan diets with low blood pressure and cholesterol, as well as lower rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some types of cancer. Building familiarity with plant-based food could help offset bad dietary habits…which are formed young, and then they contribute to public health challenges later on.

“Plant-based diets are also sustainable. Individually, we can reduce our food-related greenhouse gas emissions by up to 50 per cent by switching to a vegan diet in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, land and auto use, and soil erosion. And last year, research at the University of Oxford concluded that eating a vegan diet could be the single best way to reduce your environmental impact on the earth, and the United Nations has urged the global move towards a meat and dairy-free diet for the benefit of the planet. These are things that we’ve seen young people on the streets campaigning for, and I think that we ought to offer those same young people in their schools the option to make a choice, which I’ve mentioned isn’t very often there, to carry that into their eating choices in school.

“If you gave a plant-based diet to children in school, you’d actually be recycling peelings, not plastic.”

School pupils have made headlines recently for missing school to protest against climate change, as part of the global Youth Strike 4 Climate.

One in ten children in the UK now identify as vegetarian or vegan, according to a new report by Linda McCartney Foods. Of the 1,500 eight to 16 year olds surveyed, 44 percent had gone meat-free to be kinder to nature and animals, and a further 31 percent said they thought it was better for the planet.