Sausages are one of Britain’s top foods and according to some reports every single day approximately 3.7 million meals containing sausages are eaten in the UK alone!
Companies like Richmond Sausages pride themselves on being the nations favourite sausages and display a very green, natural feeling website but the reality of their brutal killing of innocent animals is anything but natural.
Germany is a nation known for its love of sausages with the ‘Bratwurst’ with one person online saying that they eat sausages as often as English people eat fish and chips. It’s a type of German sausage made from pork usually but can also be made from veal or beef.
Sausages have never been a ‘healthy’ food and have been linked with cancer and heart disease as pork contains nitrites and nitrates that when inside your body can change into cancer causing compounds.
These compounds occur naturally in red meat but are also added by some companies as a preservative.
German legislators have recently suggested a sausage tax which involves raising the sales tax on meat from its current rate of 7% to 19% which is well over double. This is being recommended as a solution in the fight against climate change as well as a good was of improving animal welfare.
Its now becoming common knowledge that animal agriculture is the biggest contributor to global emissions with even the UN experts and the BBC now suggesting that people should go plant-based to reduce our emissions and save the planet.
Whilst Germany has many amazing vegans doing incredible work on educating the population the country still kills 29.4 million animals in the first six months of 2019 according to the Germany Federal Statistics Office.
The outcome of this rise in the sausage tax would be to lower the demand on pork and therefore lowering the amount of livestock numbers and that would result in less gasses being released into the environment.
Germany’s Green Party is very on-board with reducing its countries global carbon footprint through methods such as banning industrial farming as well as a proposed Veggie Day where citizens would eat vegetarian once day a week however did not get much support with citizens.
Germany is quite divided over the sausage tax though with some part leaders claiming that the Green Party have a “dream of a meat-less country” and used this to turn people away from voting for the party. In the last vote it was shown that the Green Party is increasing in popularity with then getting approximately 20% of the votes which was right on the tail of rivals in the Christian Democrats who ended on 22.6%.
In fact green parties across Europe are gaining support as it has almost doubled its seats in European Parliament and has even rose above the “people’s party” the Social Democrats”.
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