In a Copenhagen City Council meeting on April 30, 2026, Birgitte Kehler Holst of the green-left party Alternativet delivered a revealing defense of the city’s strict meat-reduction policy for nursing homes.

While speaking against exempting nursing homes from the municipality’s “Food and Meal Strategy,” Holst made clear that the elderly are not exempt from the green agenda, and in fact carry a special guilt-driven burden.

What She Actually Said

From the official council transcript:

“In the eyes of the Alternative, all of us, including the elderly, must contribute to achieving our climate goals. And in fact, it is perhaps the generation that has screwed up the most.”

She continued:

“It has also been said before that meat is a human right. Pure water is a human right. It is not meat.”

Holst also argued that today’s population eats “far more meat than we did 50 years ago,” so claims that the elderly should be allowed the food they’ve always eaten “does not hold up.”

She even trotted out her own mother in her mid-eighties, bragging that the old woman “really likes” the vegetarian meals she serves her when visiting and is “super flexible” as living proof that the elderly can adapt to the new food order of Copenhagen.

The Policy She Was Defending

Copenhagen’s official strategy limits nursing home residents to just 80 grams (2.8 oz) of beef, lamb, or veal per week.

That would be 11.4 grams of lamb, beef or veal per day, or 0.4 oz.

For scale, that’s about half of a small meatball or one thin slice of roast beef spread across an entire day.

Holst was explicitly arguing against giving nursing homes any exemption from this limit.

This Is Textbook Eco-Marxism in Action

Clearly, this has nothing to do with the well-being of the elderly in care facilities in Copenhagen. But it is an excellent example of applied Marxism as filtered through the lens of the Climate narrative attack on Western Civilization.

Once the narrative is set that the planet is in an existential crisis due to a change in climate, then any policy can be forced on the public once you attribute a cause for the climate change.

Cars can be outlawed, or so heavily taxed that it is tantamount to outlawed, and meat will be a treat for the elite since they have tied cattle burps to ‘climate change’.

• Generational guilt: The elderly are cast as the villain class, namely the ones who “screwed up the most” by building the prosperous society that made modern life possible. Now they must atone through sacrifice.
• State control over basic consumption: A city government dictating exactly how many grams of meat vulnerable old people are allowed to eat is central planning of the most intimate kind. And a major aspect of communism.
• Denial of individual rights and movement upwards to greater state rights: “Meat is not a human right” perfectly captures the ideology. Your personal preferences and nutritional needs are subordinate to collective climate goals.
• Anti-human hierarchy: The weakest and most frail are expected to lead the sacrifice so the planet (and future generations) can be saved.

Marxism creates only one thing well. Scarcity, which must lead to suffering. It also moves all liberties and rights upwards from the individual to the state as if by capillary action. The question should never be, ‘How much meat should the elderly be allowed?’ The question must always be, ‘from where did the state get the power to determine how much of what I can eat?’.

As Gerald R. Ford (later echoed by Ronald Reagan) warned: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

If that could possibly be improved upon, it would be that once government is big enough to give you everything you want, it will take everything you have. Even things you didn’t realize could be taken from you. Like your choice of foods.