Meat Market: What Amsterdam’s Advertising Ban Tells Us about the Plant-Based Agenda

The Great Reset. You don’t hear much about that these days.

(That’s a Paul Skallas joke, by the way. If you don’t know who Paul Skallas is—don’t worry, you’re not missing out on much.)

But it’s true. You really don’t hear much about the Great Reset these days. In fact, you don’t hear anything at all.

For the first two or three years of the pandemic—certainly until 2022—the words “Great Reset” and the execrable slogan “Build Back Better” were on the lips of every budding Swiss Palpatine; every politician, captain of industry and Hollywood Pharisee; every Scandianavian climate-freak and every New York Times-bestselling author in an ill-fitting suit.

Because of COVID-19, we were told, our lives were destined to change forever. The pre-pandemic world was gone. Vanished. Kaput. Never coming back.

The global crisis caused by the novel coronavirus was a perfect opportunity to “reset” the global economy and society on new terms, to create a fairer, more inclusive, more environmentally friendly and sustainable world. A world that would be equipped to meet the great challenges of the 21st century—climate change and a global population of 10 billion by 2050—in a way that benefits everyone. That was what the Great Reset was all about.

And then—nothing. Like it never happened. Sure, you’ll still see people post about the Great Reset on X or Facebook, maybe the occasional boomer or crunchy homesteader mom, but you won’t hear Leonardo Dicaprio, Greta Funbags or Prince—now King—Charles III talking about it. Not any more.

Events escaped the globalist class and shook their sense of certainty about the future. The Ukraine War, in particular. But there was also, I think, a desire to avoid negative publicity and all the various “conspiracy theories” that were circulating about the abolition of property and privacy and the great happiness that would reign in the year 2030 as a result.

I’m sure there are other reasons too. Mr Great Reset himself, Klaus Schwab, even got MeToo’d recently and had to resign from the World Economic Forum, which he founded way back in 1972. He now sells dodgy online courses like a manosphere grifter or a failed academic.

In 2022, I wrote a book called The Eggs Benedict Option about the plan for a global plant-based diet and how it would be a disaster for our health and our freedom. I chose the Great Reset as the framing for my book because, well, it seemed a pretty obvious thing to do. A central part of the Great Reset vision of the world is the more-or-less complete renunciation of animal foods, to be replaced by “healthier,” “more sustainable” diets built around plant proteins, insects and new high-tech products like “plant-based meat” and “lab-grown meat.” I compared this vision of the future to the first Agricultural Revolution, about ten thousand years ago, which I called the “first Great Reset:” a transformation of every aspect of Neolithic society that took place with the spread of fixed-field agriculture and the growth of the first cities and states.

The adoption of a global plant-based diet, I warned, would continue a trend that has been going on for a century now and made us unhealthier, unhappier and more dependent on government and the medical industry than ever before in human history. Corporations, in particular, would come to control every aspect of the food supply, from field to plate—or bioreactor to plate, as the case may be.

Looking back at that book now, and it was a pretty big success, I can’t help cringing a little because of my use of the Great Reset label. It really does feel anachronistic. Even at the time I tried to distance myself from the more outlandish theories about Klaus Schwab and his supposed plan for world domination, which some tried to link to his father’s Nazi past and his own role working on the Apartheid government’s nuclear-weapons program.

But the Great Reset, and the plan for a global plant-based diet, hasn’t really gone away.

We got a reminder of that over the last couple of days with the news that Amsterdam has now become the first capital city in the world to ban all public advertisements for meat, as well as fossil-fuel products like cars and flights.

BBC News reports, “At one of the city’s busiest tram stops, adjacent to a grassy roundabout bursting with vibrant yellow daffodils and orange tulips, the poster advertising landscape has changed.

“They now promote the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands, and a piano concert. Until last week it was chicken nuggets, SUVs and low-budget holidays.”

The city’s lawmakers say the move is part of a broader initiative to make the city “carbon-neutral” by 2050, which includes encouraging residents to halve their meat consumption by 2050.

“The climate crisis is very urgent,” says Anneke Veenhoff from the GreenLeft Party.

“I mean, if you want to be leading in climate policies and you rent out your walls to exactly the opposite, then what are you doing?

“Most people don’t understand why the municipality should make money out of renting our public space with something that we are actively having policies against.”

Meat and fossil-fuel advertising made up a vanishingly small proportion of advertisements in the city—the former, just 0.1% of total ad spending—but advocates of the new regulation believe it sends a “strong message” and “reframes purely dietary advice to a climate issue.”

An expert interviewed by the BBC said the advertising ban on meat products is a “fantastic natural experiment,” which will provide evidence of whether such measures can be used to change “social norms” and reduce consumption.

“If we see advertisements for fast food everywhere, it normalizes the consumption of behaviour of fast consumption,” says Mackenbach, who is from the Department of Epidemiology and Data Science at hospital Amsterdam University Medical Center.

“So if we take away those types of cues in our public living environments, then that is also going to have an impact on those social norms.”

Amsterdam’s advertising ban is a reminder that incrementalism and manipulation are the order of the day here. That’s how we arrive in a world where no-one—except the globalist 1%­—eats meat: by inches and with the illusion of popular consent. Many have suggested governments could ban meat and animal products like dairy, but this strikes me as simple-minded. It would be too unpopular—it would smack of tyranny. Even during the pandemic, the appearance of individual choice had to be maintained. The velvet glove was never removed from the iron fist.

Instead, what we’re seeing now and will continue to see is clever strategies that stop well short of outright bans, but reduce consumer choice all the same.

Just look at the way many “alternative” foods are now being marketed. Rather than making appeals to consumers on the basis of taste and health claims most people will simply never believe, companies are trying to sell their products by making you feel guilty.

Look at Oatly. In line with market research, the oatmilk-maker pivoted to a strategy based on emotion and peer pressure—or, rather, child pressure. In its revolting “Help Dad” campaign, hopelessly unwoke fathers are subjected to a fridge-door inquisition from their teenage kids as they reach for a glass of cow’s milk. The message: You should be ashamed of wanting to drink real milk.

Thankfully, in the US you now have Make America Healthy Again, under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, beginning a pushback. This year, in one of the most important changes to official health policy in decades, Kennedy flipped the FDA’s food pyramid on its head, making high-quality animal foods the basis of a proper diet instead of grains—as they should be. You also have Republican state governments, like Florida under Ron DeSantis, issuing new laws to support traditional agriculture and ban so-called “foods of the future” like lab-grown meat. Free-market absolutists will, of course, cry foul, but they willfully ignore the ways markets are controlled by governments and big business. The market is not a level playing-field.

All of this is a reminder of a point that was central to The Eggs Benedict Option: Only a determined political movement can now ensure we have access to the nutritious animal foods we need to grow and flourish—and to remain free.

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