This ban on advertising meat is the nanny state at its silliest. (Washington Post editorial board, May 5, 2026)

From The Washington Post: 

This ban on advertising meat is the nanny state at its silliest

Amsterdam insults its people by thinking regulating speech will change behavior.

May 5, 2026 at 5:45 a.m. EDTToday at 5:45 a.m. EDT

2 min

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(Illustration by Laura Padilla Castellanos/The Washington Post; iStock)

Psychedelics and prostitution are legal in Amsterdam, but the Dutch city just banned all advertisements for meat in public spaces. Its justification: Eating meat contributes to climate change.

Censoring ads for beef, pork, chicken and even fish won’t reduce carbon emissions. Nor will it make people less hungry for protein and other nutrients essential to a healthy diet.

This is the nanny state at its silliest. Dutch politicians don’t trust their citizens to decide for themselves what to eat. The European greens are so hypnotized by climate hysteria and the belief that it poses an “existential threat” that they rationalize authoritarianism.

Backers of the new law say they hope to create the same kind of stigma around eating animal products as smoking cigarettes. Thank goodness for the First Amendment. 

In the United States, the fake-meat fad ended years ago as the novelty wore off, the taste never really improved, and consumers bristled at the amount of unnatural processing involved. Beyond Meat’s stock is down 99 percent from its 2019 high. The Agriculture Department’s inverted food pyramid calls for consuming twice as much protein as before. 

Meanwhile, Amsterdam has set a totally unrealistic goal for residents to get 60 percent of their protein from plant-based sources by 2030. 

The city is following other European municipalities down the regulatory road toward increasing state control over what you can say, see and eat. Two years ago in The Hague, the city council banned fossil fuel ads. A judge upheld that law on the unsettling principle that climate concerns take precedence over commercial interests.

Shaming people for wanting to enjoy a hamburger is smug and elitist. Humanity will have an easier time innovating out of the challenges posed by climate change if it’s not working on an empty stomach.

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