Denmark’s New Climate Criminals: 89-Year-Olds and Their Meatballs (Danish version in comment).
We have a political party in Denmark, Alternativet (The Alternative), that believes our elderly in Copenhagen’s care homes should get one third of the meat sitting on my plate… and hold on tight… PER WEEK.
80 grams of red meat. Per week. That’s 11 grams a day. I eat between 200 and 300 grams PER DAY. Because the human body needs it. No matter what the climate cult and Greta Thunberg want you to believe.
And the justification? Alternativet’s group chair, Birgitte Kehler Holst, said it herself from the podium of Copenhagen’s City Council: “In Alternativet’s eyes, everyone, including the elderly, must contribute to reaching our climate goals. And parenthetically, that is precisely the generation that has polluted the most.”
Let me get this straight.
A politician from a party polling somewhere between a rounding error and a typo has decided that 89-year-old Ingrid, who survived the German occupation, rebuilt this country, raised its children, paid taxes for 50 years and now weighs 48 kilos in a care home bed… is the climate criminal. Not China. Not the container ships. Ingrid. With her meatball.
11 grams of red meat a day is not a meal. It’s what falls off the cutting board. You couldn’t bait a mousetrap with it.
And the moral logic is breathtaking. “That generation polluted the most, so they must pay the price.” Collective punishment by birth year, served cold with lentils. The generation that polluted “the most” also happens to be the generation that built the wealth funding Birgitte’s salary and her seat on the council. She gets to see the world. Ingrid gets to see a bean patty.
Because that’s the actual sermon here: climate sacrifice is for the people who can’t fight back. Not for the politician with the passport full of stamps. For the woman with the walker. Pick the one group with no voice, no exit and no appetite to lose, and make them the example. Brave.
And here’s where it stops being funny: malnutrition among the elderly is a real and well-documented problem, and older people need MORE protein per kilo than younger people, precisely because muscle loss is what ends in wheelchairs and hospital beds. Protein-rich, familiar food is medicine at that age. Alternativet looked at frail people in their final years and decided the planet needs their beef patty more than they do.
She has since apologized. For the phrasing, mind you. Not the policy. She’s sorry she said the quiet part out loud. Not sorry she means it.
The good news for Ingrid: even if she ate beef at every single meal until her last day, her total climate footprint wouldn’t match one of Birgitte’s long-haul holidays.
Because yes, while Birgitte weighs old people’s meat portions in the name of the climate, she has, according to Danish outlet Journalista, flown 47,272 kilometers around the world on holiday herself. That’s more than once around the globe. She claimed the trips were climate compensated… which the University of Copenhagen denies.
So here’s my proposal for Copenhagen’s fairest climate policy: The elderly keep their meat. And Birgitte keeps her feet on the ground.