Vegan Womens Club Official

Amsterdam has now put meat advertising in the same conversation as other products the city says it no longer wants promoted across public space.

Under rules that took effect May 1, meat advertisements visible from public roads and other publicly accessible places are prohibited across Amsterdam.

That means the kind of billboards, street displays and outdoor advertising people encounter simply moving through the city.

There is an important exception: restaurants, supermarkets, butchers and other businesses can still advertise meat at or directly around the place where they sell it.

And this isn’t an attempt to make meat illegal. People can still buy it. Restaurants can still serve it. The policy is about whether the city should help provide a constant public advertising platform for it.

Amsterdam’s ordinance explicitly points to the influence advertising can have on consumption and to the climate impact of the products being promoted.

It fits into a much larger shift already underway. Amsterdam’s food strategy calls for 60% of the protein consumed in the city to come from plant sources by 2030, with the city describing eating more plant-based and less animal-based food as beneficial for both health and the environment.

There’s also a public-health conversation here that deserves some precision. The World Health Organization’s cancer agency classifies processed meat as carcinogenic to humans, based on sufficient evidence that it causes colorectal cancer.

Red meat is classified as probably carcinogenic, where the evidence is less conclusive. Those categories describe the strength of the evidence, not that eating a hot dog carries the same level of risk as smoking.

For decades, meat advertising has simply been treated as part of the scenery.

Amsterdam is asking a different question: just because a product can legally be sold, does that automatically mean it needs to be advertised everywhere we look?

Sources: City of Amsterdam; Amsterdam Municipal Gazette; WHO / International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Poland has become the first country in its own legal history to guarantee children in schools access to fully plant-based meals, and the rules just came into force.

The Minister of Health signed the regulation on February 16, 2026. It came into effect on September 1, 2026 and replaces the 2016 school nutrition standard. The new rules apply to more than 6.8 million students across nearly 36,000 public schools and preschools.

Under the regulation, schools must serve at least one fully plant-based dish per week prepared from legumes such as beans, chickpeas, or lentils, and made without the addition of any animal-based products. On days when meat or fish is on the menu, a nutritious plant-based alternative must also be offered. Meat can only be served twice a week and fish at least once.

The regulation explicitly names plant-based drinks, plant-based dairy alternatives, and plant-based meat alternatives as full components of school nutrition. School shops in Poland are also now allowed to sell plant-based dairy alternatives.

The reform followed roughly 800 public consultation submissions, driven by campaigning from the Green REV Institute and its Plant Based School programme, with support from the ProVeg Foundation. Anna Spurek, CEO of Green REV Institute, called the outcome a lesson in how systemic change actually works, and said advocacy without a movement behind it has no clout in public policy.

For 6.8 million Polish children, a plant-based option is no longer optional. It is law.