How Ghent Turned 83% of Residents Into Flexitarians
Belgium's Ghent has made Thursdays meat-free citywide. A decade ago, just 13% of residents called themselves flexitarian.
A Belgian city of roughly 260,000 people has quietly engineered one of the most dramatic dietary shifts in modern urban history. In Ghent, 83% of residents now describe themselves as flexitarian — a figure that stood at just 13% in 2014 — the result of a sustained, city-wide push to reduce meat consumption anchored around a weekly ritual known as Veggie Day.
Every Thursday, schools, nurseries, care homes, community centers and workplace canteens across the city serve exclusively plant-based menus. At BS De Stadspoort primary school, students sit down to dishes such as chicory soup, falafel, Mediterranean vegetable tagine and couscous with little apparent resistance, illustrating how normalized the practice has become among younger residents.
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The program represents a deliberate policy intervention rather than a spontaneous cultural trend. By embedding plant-based eating into public institutions — places where citizens have limited menu choice — city planners effectively normalized meat-free meals across age groups and income levels, reaching populations that might never have reduced meat consumption on their own initiative.
The Ghent model draws attention internationally as municipalities and national governments seek scalable strategies to cut diet-related carbon emissions and address public health concerns tied to high meat intake. Shifting institutional catering is widely regarded by researchers as a high-impact lever because it operates at population scale without relying on individual consumer motivation or purchasing power.
Whether Ghent's approach can be replicated in cities with different cultural relationships to meat remains an open question, but the decade-long trajectory from 13% to 83% flexitarian self-identification offers a compelling case study in behavior change through infrastructure rather than persuasion alone. Continue reading at Business | The Guardian.
