13 Pork Cuts: The Sharp Edges of Nativism in Southern Europe
13 Pork Cuts: The Sharp Edges of Nativism in Southern Europe
Aitana Guia
Too many political leaders are banking on politicizing migration today. Culture has become a fertile battlefield. Food represents familiarity and safety. Eating is a daily activity that connects parents to their children, to their schools, and to their extended families. Social life in Southern Europe revolves around food and food rituals. Donna Gabbacia, a historian of the American immigrant experience, explains that the “choices people make about eating are rarely trivial or accidental. Food is a central concern of human beings in all times and in all places.”1
Marine Le Pen’s Front National (FN) knows it.
Unsavoury School Meals
In 2015, the FN mayors of the south-western town of Arveyres and the Burgundy town of Chalon-sur-Saône ruled to eliminate the so-called “substitute meals” for students with religious dietary restrictions. In practice, that meant eliminating the no-pork options from the menu. “Pork or nothing,” a Muslim French nurse and mother was told by her City Hall just outside of Paris.
While these measures are justified as a strict defence of secularism, a way to fight “le communautarisme,” or as a cost-cutting measure, the French Socialist government has condemned these moves for “taking Muslim children hostage.”
France is a European exception in trying to accommodate the religious dietary restrictions of Muslim children. Some cities in the United Kingdom offer halal menus to children and Spanish schools offer no-pork or vegetarian options. Neither of these measures is uncontroversial. In the United Kingdom and Denmark, some animal right supporters oppose Muslim and Jewish ritual slaughter practices as inhumane.
In Spain in late 2014, dozens of Muslim parents removed their school children from the school canteen in the Valencian town of Alzira. They demanded a halal menu for their children. No-pork and vegetarian menus, which they had been guaranteed for the previous 9 years and are also offered to Muslims in prisons and hospitals throughout Spain, were no longer enough. The school, city, and regional administrations argued that nowhere in Spain are halal menus offered to Muslims in the care of state institutions, and that no-pork or vegetarian menus already guarantee the rights Muslims where given in the State-Islamic Commission of Spain Agreement signed in 1992.
Mariachiara Giorda, professor of the history of religions at Milano Biccoca, and her project Benvenuti in Italia wanted to solve food controversies by designing a “universal menu” that could accommodate most dietary restrictions of religious minorities in Europe.2
“Eating together has a long history of symbolizing peaceful acceptance among peoples of differing cultures,” Donna Gabbaccia reminds us. Jean-Paul Beneytou, the mayor of Chilly-Mazarin–representing Nicolas Sarkozy’s right wing Les Républicains party–conveniently followed the lead of the FN and eliminated the no-pork menu from schools. Bene