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    Indiana Evangelicals Are Focusing on Creation Care With Environmental Work

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    The solar panels on the churches were inspired by Scripture.So were the LED lights throughout the buildings, the electric-vehicle charging stations, the native pollinator gardens and organic food plots, the composting, the focus on consuming less and reusing more.The evangelical Christians behind these efforts in Indiana say that by taking on this planet-healing work, they are following the biblical mandate to care for God’s creation.50 States, 50 Fixes is a series about local solutions to environmental problems. More to come this year.“It’s a quiet movement,” said the Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental Network, a nonprofit group with projects nationwide.In Central Indiana, a patchwork of evangelical churches and universities has been sharing ideas and lessons on how to expand these efforts, broadly known as creation care. Some have partnered on an Earth Day-like celebration they named Indy Creation Fest.Tell Us About Solutions Where You Live More

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      Living Car-Free in Arizona, on Purpose and Happily

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      Last year, when Andre Rouhani and Gabriela Reyes toured Culdesac Tempe, a rental development outside of Phoenix, the place looked pretty sweet. It had winsome walkways, boutique shops and low-slung white stucco buildings clustered around shaded courtyards.The only surprise came when Mr. Rouhani, 33, a doctoral student at Arizona State University, asked about resident parking and was told there was none.The couple had two dogs, a toddler and another baby on the way. “Long story short, we decided that all the pros outweigh the cons,” Mr. Rouhani said in a recent phone interview. The family gave its car to Ms. Reyes’ father and moved into Culdesac in December. “We do really, really love it here,” Mr. Rouhani said. “It’s the best place I’ve ever lived.”50 States, 50 Fixes is a series about local solutions to environmental problems. More to come this year.Modeled on towns in Italy and Greece built long before the advent of cars, Culdesac Tempe is what its developers call the country’s first neighborhood purposely built to be car free. Tell Us About Solutions Where You Live

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      Care About Food Waste? In Massachusetts, You Can Be a Compost Consultant.

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      America has a food waste problem: Rotten tomatoes and pizza boxes end up in trash dumps and produce a potent planet-heating gas called methane.Massachusetts has a fix: A state regulation requires businesses to keep food out of dumpsters. To help them comply, the state offers a carrot, in the form of a chatty, practical, 63-year-old hand-holding food-waste-reduction consultant named Heather Billings.Which is how, on a frigid Wednesday morning, Ms. Billings found herself poking around the narrow kitchen of the Port Tavern, a sports bar in Newburyport, Mass.An owner of the Port Tavern, Abbie Hannan, left, invited Ms. Billings to look at how the restaurant managed its waste.She quickly spotted a very solvable problem at the prep cook’s station: a 23-gallon trash can into which went tomato tops and other food scraps.Then came the dumpster inspection. Could anything in there go to compost?Ms. Billings, a consultant contracted by the state government, took notes, snapped pictures and peered behind the bar to assess where the lemon wedges and plastic olive skewers ended up.She had some easy fixes for Port Tavern’s co-owner Abbie Hannan. She proposed inexpensive, four-gallon plastic buckets to nest inside the bigger trash bins to collect food scraps. She connected Ms. Hannan to compost haulers and a charity that could pick up leftover edible food.Tell Us About Solutions Where You Live

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      These Modern Homesteaders Live Off the Grid, but They’re Extremely Online

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      In corners of the internet — and in wooded, undeveloped parts of the country — young men are documenting their efforts to to live off the land.Nate Petroski’s address doesn’t help visitors find his house. Locating it, instead, requires specific GPS coordinates to a spot deep in West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, and precise instructions on how to get there. Many of the surrounding roads are impassable without an ATV to traverse several creeks and muddy inclines.It’s much easier to visit him online.Mr. Petroski, 39, is a prominent video creator in the modern-day homesteading movement, determined to live a life of semi-self-sufficiency “off grid,” or disconnected from the power, water, gas and telecommunications lines that connect most residential addresses in the United States. But rather than embracing the reclusive life often associated with off-grid homesteaders in rural areas, Mr. Petroski is extremely prolific online, broadcasting his daily life to millions of followers on social media.His property, known as NarroWay Homestead, is one of the most sophisticated and most-watched operations in a burgeoning niche of online creators who document their off-grid or sustainable living projects across the country, often promoting a way of life that seems diametrically opposed to the mediums they use to share it.“Almost everything I own is a hybrid of ancient knowledge and modern technology,” Mr. Petroski said. His water, he explained, comes from rainwater that runs off his roof into a self-filtering pipe and tank system — and is then pumped throughout his buildings with solar-powered electric pumps.One afternoon in July, Mr. Petroski and his wife, Jen, filmed a video for TikTok, which helps them support their homesteading lifestyle.Kristian Thacker for The New York TimesMr. Petroski’s video recording setup.Kristian Thacker for The New York TimesThe plaque Mr. Petroski received from YouTube when he reached one million subscribers.Kristian Thacker for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Electric Car Batteries Might Aid the Grid (and Win Over Drivers)

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      Automakers are exploring energy storage as a way to help utilities and save customers money, turning an expensive component into an industry asset.Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline models largely because batteries cost so much. But new technology could turn those pricey devices into an asset, giving owners benefits like reduced utility bills, lower lease payments or free parking.Ford Motor, General Motors, BMW and other automakers are exploring how electric-car batteries could be used to store excess renewable energy to help utilities deal with fluctuations in supply and demand for power. Automakers would make money by serving as intermediaries between car owners and power suppliers.Millions of cars could be thought of as a huge energy system that, for the first time, will be connected to another enormous energy system, the electrical grid, said Matthias Preindl, an associate professor of power electronic systems at Columbia University.“We’re just at the starting point,” Dr. Preindl said. “They will interact more in the future, and they can potentially support one another — or stress one another.”A large flat screen on the wall of the Munich offices of the Mobility House, a firm whose investors include Mercedes-Benz and Renault, illustrates one way that carmakers could profit while helping to stabilize the grid.The graphs and numbers on the screen provide a real-time picture of a European energy market where investors and utilities buy and sell electricity. The price changes from minute to minute as supply and demand surge or ebb.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A.I. Frenzy Complicates Efforts to Keep Power-Hungry Data Sites Green

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      West Texas, from the oil rigs of the Permian Basin to the wind turbines twirling above the High Plains, has long been a magnet for companies seeking fortunes in energy.Now, those arid ranch lands are offering a new moneymaking opportunity: data centers.Lancium, an energy and data center management firm setting up shop in Fort Stockton and Abilene, is one of many companies around the country betting that building data centers close to generating sites will allow them to tap into underused clean power.“It’s a land grab,” said Lancium’s president, Ali Fenn.In the past, companies built data centers close to internet users, to better meet consumer requests, like streaming a show on Netflix or playing a video game hosted in the cloud. But the growth of artificial intelligence requires huge data centers to train the evolving large-language models, making proximity to users less necessary.But as more of these sites start to pop up across the United States, there are new questions on whether they can meet the demand while still operating sustainably. The carbon footprint from the construction of the centers and the racks of expensive computer equipment is substantial in itself, and their power needs have grown considerably.Just a decade ago, data centers drew 10 megawatts of power, but 100 megawatts is common today. The Uptime Institute, an industry advisory group, has identified 10 supersize cloud computing campuses across North America with an average size of 621 megawatts.This growth in electricity demand comes as manufacturing in the United States is the highest in the past half-century, and the power grid is becoming increasingly strained.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      British Conservatives’ Commitment to Green Policy Is Tested

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      British conservatives kept a seat in a recent election by opposing an ultralow emissions zone, and some are now questioning ambitious emissions-reduction targets.Britain, blanketed by cool, damp weather, has seemed like one of the few places in the Northern Hemisphere not sweltering this summer. Yet a fierce political debate over how to curb climate change has suddenly erupted, fueled by economic hardship and a recent election surprise.The surprise came last week in a London suburb, Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where the Conservative Party held on to a vulnerable seat in Parliament in a by-election after a voter backlash against the expansion of a low-emission zone, which will penalize people who drive older, more polluting cars.The Conservatives successfully used the emission zone plan as a wedge issue to prevail in a district they were forecast to lose. It didn’t go unnoticed in the halls of Parliament, where even though lawmakers are in recess, they have managed to agitate over environmental policy for four days running.Britain’s Conservative government is now calling into question its commitment to an array of ambitious emissions-reduction targets. Tory critics say these goals would impose an unfair burden on Britons who are suffering because of a cost-of-living crisis. Uxbridge, they argued, shows there is a political price for forging ahead.With a general election looming next year, the Tories also see an opportunity to wield climate policy as a club against the opposition Labour Party, which once planned to pour 28 billion pounds, or about $36 billion, a year into green jobs and industries but scaled back its own ambitions amid the economic squeeze.On Monday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he would approach environmental policies in a “proportionate and pragmatic a way that doesn’t unnecessarily give people more hassle and more costs in their lives.”It was a strikingly circumspect statement given Britain’s self-proclaimed leadership in climate policy, which goes back to Margaret Thatcher and includes hosting the annual United Nations climate conference in 2021. And it clearly reflected the new political thinking in the aftermath of the Uxbridge vote.Government officials insist Mr. Sunak is not giving up on a ban on the sale of fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2030. Britain remains committed to a benchmark goal of being a net-zero — or carbon neutral — economy by 2050, which is enshrined in law. But on Tuesday, a senior minister, Michael Gove, said he wanted to review a project to end the installation of new gas boilers in homes.Traffic at the edge of the London Ultra-Low Emission Zone this month.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockEven before Mr. Sunak’s comments, critics contended that Britain’s historically strong record on climate policy had been waning.The Climate Change Committee, an independent body that advises the government, recently said Britain “has lost its clear global leadership position on climate action.” The group cited the government’s failure to use the spike in fuel prices to reduce energy demand and bolster renewables. It also noted Britain’s consent for a new coal mine, and its support for new oil and gas production in the North Sea.Last month, Zac Goldsmith quit as a minister with a climate-related portfolio, blaming “apathy” over the environment for his departure, though he was also a close ally of the former prime minister, Boris Johnson. In a letter to Mr. Sunak, Mr. Goldsmith wrote, “The problem is not that the government is hostile to the environment, it is that you, our prime minister, are simply uninterested.”Climate experts said Britain’s economic troubles fractured what had been a broad political consensus on the need for aggressive action. The schism isn’t just between the two main parties: Even within the Conservative and Labour parties, there are fissures between those who continue to call for far-reaching goals and those who want to scale back those ambitions.“This used to be an issue of across-party consensus; now it is not,” said Tom Burke, the chairman of E3G, an environmental research group. “The Tories have gone out of their way to turn it into a wedge issue, and I think that’s a mistake.”In Uxbridge, however, the strategy worked. The district, with its leafy streets and suburban homes, has one of the capital’s highest ratios of car dependency. That made plans by London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, to expand an ultra-low-emissions zone to encompass the district a potent issue for Conservatives, who opposed widening the zone.While the plan aims to improve London’s poor air quality, rather than reach net-zero targets, it was vulnerable to accusations that was piling on costs to consumers — in this case drivers of older, more polluting, vehicles.“It’s a really big impact at a time when people are concerned more generally about the cost of living,” said David Simmonds, a Conservative lawmaker in neighboring district of Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner. “In the short term, a lot of people who don’t have the money to buy an electric vehicle or a compliant vehicle are caught by this.”Zac Goldsmith quit as a minister with a climate-related portfolio.Matt Dunham/Associated PressThe surprise Conservative victory also sent alarm bells ringing within Labour. It caused tension between Mr. Khan, who insists the expansion will go ahead, and the party’s leader, Keir Starmer, who seemed to want a delay.“We are doing something very wrong if policies put forward by the Labour Party end up on each and every Tory leaflet,” Mr. Starmer said after the defeat. “We’ve got to face up to that and learn the lessons.”Even before the by-election, Labour had backtracked on its plan to invest billions a year on green industries. It blamed rising borrowing costs, which spiked during the ill-fated premiership last year of Liz Truss. Now, instead of rolling out spending in the first year of a Labour government, the party said it would phase it in.Labour’s fear was that voters would conclude the incoming government would have to raise taxes, which would give the Tories another opening. “Economic stability, financial stability, always has to come first, and it will do with Labour,” Rachel Reeves, who leads economic policy for the Labour Party, told the BBC.Such language is worlds away from a year ago, when Ed Miliband, who speaks for Labour on climate issues, told Climate Forward, a New York Times conference in London, that “the imprudent, reckless thing to do is not to make the investment.”He did, however, also argue that consumers should not carry all the burden of the transition. “The government has to collectivize some of those costs to make this transition fair,” said Mr. Miliband, a former party leader.Climate activists said Labour had made a mistake by highlighting the costs of its plan at a time of tight public finances. But given the broad public support for climate action, particularly among the young, some argue that a debate over which climate policies are the best need not end in failure for Labour.“Voters want something done,” Mr. Burke said. “They don’t want to pay the price for it but equally, they don’t want the government to say they are not doing anything about climate change.”Protesters rally against the Ultra-Low Emission Zone, or ULEZ, this month in London.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockFor all the new skepticism, climate policy is also deeply embedded in the Conservative Party. Mrs. Thatcher was one of the first world leaders to talk about the threat to the planet from greenhouse gases in 1989. A former prime minister, Theresa May, passed the net-zero pledge in 2019, and Mr. Johnson, as mayor of London, conceived the low-emission zone that boomeranged against Labour in Uxbridge, which Mr. Johnson had represented in Parliament, last week.Alice Bell, the head of climate policy at the Wellcome Trust, noted that some Tory lawmakers were rebelling against Mr. Sunak because they were worried about losing their seats by appearing to be against firm action on climate change.Extreme weather, she said, would continue to drive public opinion on climate change. While Britain’s summer has been cool, thousands of Britons have been vacationing in the scorching heat of Italy and Spain, to say nothing of those evacuated from the Greek island of Rhodes in the face of deadly wildfires.“I’m wondering if we’re going to have some people coming back from holiday as climate activists,” Ms. Bell said. More

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      Jay Inslee Sees Greener Pastures Ahead

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      After nearly 30 years in elected office, Washington’s governor plans to shift his focus to climate solutions and clean energy, underscoring the need for “a sense of optimism and confidence.”Jay Inslee has been in elected office so long that he served in Congress during the tail end of the George H.W. Bush administration.On Monday Mr. Inslee, 72, announced that he would not seek a fourth term as Washington State’s governor, ending a nearly 30-year career in elected office. He went to Congress as a centrist Democrat and evolved into a fierce critic of the Iraq war and later of President Donald J. Trump. He will leave the State Capitol after the 2024 elections as one of America’s leading climate hawks.Mr. Inslee ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination by arguing that the country would have to radically reshape its relationship with fossil fuels and promote renewable energy. While Mr. Inslee’s candidacy never caught fire, his goals later became the blueprint for the climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law last year.When I interviewed Mr. Inslee in 2017, he said the only other job he would want was to be the quarterback of his hometown Seattle Seahawks. When I reminded him of this as we spoke Monday afternoon, he replied, “Now I want to be the next goalie for the Seattle Kraken,” the city’s hockey team. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Why did you make this decision now?There comes a time to pass the torch, and to everything there is a season, and for a variety of reasons, I decided it was the right season. But I’ve got another year and a half to put the pedal to the metal. My dad was a track coach, and he always said run through the tape, so I’ll be running through the tape. Have you spoken with President Biden about your decision?I have not, but he has a few other things on his mind, so I’m happy that he’s up and running in his race. I’m glad he’s in his race.How would you grade him on climate policy?I’ve never liked grades because I always thought it was a bit presumptuous, but I can just tell you I was so delighted at him pulling a rabbit out of the hat to get the Inflation Reduction Act through. Its prospects were so dim. And for him to get that $360 billion in clean energy investment is so pivotal for us to have even a fighting chance to deal with climate.I just came from an unveiling of the world’s largest commercial hydrogen fuel cell plane that represents a potential for sustainable aviation. Last week, I signed a permit for a solar farm in Yakima County. These are the things that his accomplishment is going to accelerate, and I could not be more excited about that. So, you know, there’s always things on siting and permitting that are contentious.You mentioned the siting and permitting. I take it you’re referring to his approving the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. I imagine you don’t agree with his decisions on that front.I don’t, but he won the presidency, and I did not. So we should point that out.What’s your level of interest in serving in his administration at some point?It isn’t something I’ve thought about. I really am so focused on the next 20 months. I think he’s done a real crackerjack job as president. I’m glad he’s running. I feel good about him winning the next election. I just haven’t thought about what happens after this term of office, except it’s going to be involved in something that will push the climate agenda and the clean energy economic development. I’ll find some way to be productive in that realm.It sounds like you’d listen if the president were to call and talk to you about something.Of course I would listen, but it’s just not something that’s on my agenda to consider at the moment.We talked a lot when you were running for president about the urgency of the climate moment. Do you think the country and the planet are beyond a state of no return?One of the most important things we need to do at this moment is to establish a sense of optimism and confidence in what you might call a can-do attitude when it comes to the development of clean energy. It is necessary to keep people from the despair, which leads to inactivity and passivity. And the antidote for despair is action. It is also just healthy for us from a mental health standpoint.The rate of change is so dramatic that it legitimately should give us optimism in our ability to transform this economy much faster than we believe. In 2007, I said we’re going to be driving electric cars. People thought I was smoking the cheap stuff. Well, now we’re buying them so fast that production can’t even keep up.Obviously, we are going to be suffering some changes that to some degree are baked into the climatic system. But we don’t need to focus on despair, we need to focus on action and a can-do spirit. More

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      The Unlikely Issue Upending France: Meatless School Lunches

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      The Green party mayor of Lyon, a gastronomic capital, introduced no-meat menus in schools. Let the anguish begin.LYON — Grégory Doucet, the mild-mannered Green party mayor of Lyon, hardly seems a revolutionary. But he has upended France by announcing last month that elementary school lunch menus for 29,000 Lyonnais children would no longer include meat.An outrage! An ecological diktat that could signal the end of French gastronomy, even French culture! Ministers in President Emmanuel Macron’s government clashed. If Lyon, the city of beef snouts and pigs’ ears, of saucisson and kidneys, could do such a thing, the apocalypse was surely imminent.“The reaction has been quite astonishing,” Mr. Doucet, 47, said.He is a slight man whose mischievous mien and goatee gives him the air of one of Dumas’s three musketeers. A political neophyte elected last year, he clearly finds it a little ludicrous that he, an apostle of less, should end up with more, sitting beneath a 25-foot ceiling in a cavernous mayor’s office adorned with brocade and busts of his forbears. That tweaking a local school menu has split the nation leaves him incredulous.“My decision was purely pragmatic,” he insisted, eyes twinkling — a means to speed up lunches in socially distanced times by offering a single menu rather than the traditional choice of two dishes.“My decision was purely pragmatic,” said the mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesNot so, thundered Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister. He tweeted that dropping meat was an “unacceptable insult to French farmers and butchers” that betrays “an elitist and moralist” attitude. Julien Denormandie, the agriculture minister, called the mayor’s embrace of the meatless lunch “shameful from a social point of view” and “aberrational from a nutritional point of view.”All of which prompted Barbara Pompili, the minister of ecological transition, to speak of the “prehistoric” views, full of “hackneyed clichés,” of these men, in effect calling two of her cabinet colleagues Neanderthals.This heated exchange over little illustrated several things. Mr. Macron’s government and party, La République en Marche, remain an uneasy marriage of right and left. The rising popularity of the Greens, who run not only Lyon but also Bordeaux and Grenoble, has sharpened a cultural clash between urban environmental crusaders and the defenders of French tradition in the countryside.Not least, nothing gets the French quite as dyspeptic as disagreement over food.The mayor, it must be said, made his move in a city with an intense gastronomic tradition. At the Boucherie François on the banks of the Rhône, a centennial establishment, Lyon’s culture of meat is on ample display. The veal liver and kidneys glistened; cuts of roast beef wrapped in pork fat abounded; the heads of yellow and white chickens lolled on a counter; the saucissons, some with pistachio, took every cylindrical form; the pastry-wrapped pâté showed off a core of foie gras; and pigs’ trotters and ears betrayed this city’s carnivorous inclinations.“The mayor made a mistake,” said François Teixeira, a butcher who has worked at François for 19 years. “This is not good for Lyon’s image.”François Teixeira at his butcher shop in Lyon. “The mayor made a mistake,” he said.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesCertainly, the mayor’s decision came at a sensitive moment. The right in France has expressed indignation that the country is being force-marched, through politically correct environmental dogmatism, toward a future of bicycles, electric cars, veganism, locavores, negative planet-saving growth and general joylessness — something at a very far cry from stuffing goose livers for personal delectation.Last year, Pierre Hurmic, the Green party mayor of Bordeaux, touched a nerve when he rejected the city’s traditional Christmas tree because it’s “a dead tree.” Mr. Doucet’s culinary move was part of “an ideological agenda,” the right-wing weekly Valeurs Actuelles proclaimed in a cover story. “The canteens of Lyon were just a pretext.”Mr. Doucet, who describes himself as a “flexitarian,” or someone who favors vegetables but also eats a little meat, argues that the Education Ministry forced his hand. By doubling social distancing at schools to two meters, or more than six feet, it obliged the mayor to accelerate lunch by offering just one dish.“There’s a mathematical equation,” he said. “You have the same number of tables, but you have to put fewer children at them, and you can’t start the lunch break at 10 a.m.”But why nix meat? The mayor, who has a 7-year-old in elementary school, rolled his eyes. “We have not gone to a vegetarian menu! Every day, the children can eat fish or eggs.” Because a significant number of students already did not eat meat, he said, “we just took the lowest common denominator.”It was not, Mr. Doucet said, an ideological decision, even if he aims over his six-year term to adjust school menus toward “a greater share of vegetable proteins.”The mayor continued: “Most of the time these days there’s not much choice. You don’t have the choice to go to a museum, or to the theater, or to the cinema. It’s indecent for the right-wing opposition to say that I am trampling on our liberties in the context of a state of emergency.”A portrait of Paul Bocuse, one of France’s most celebrated chefs, in Lyon.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMr. Macron has adopted a balancing act between his embrace of a Green future and, as he put it last year, his rejection of “the Amish model” for France. The president tries to differentiate rational from punitive or extreme environmentalism.The president, casting his net wide as usual ahead of regional elections in June, wants to appeal to conservative farmers while attracting some of the Green vote. During a recent visit to a farm, he attacked attempts to forge a new agriculture based on “invective, bans and demagoguery.” In an apparent allusion to the Lyon fiasco, he has said “good sense” should prevail in balanced children’s diets and noted that, “We lose a lot of time in idiotic divisions.”His government has proposed a Constitutional amendment, the first since 2008, that, if approved in a referendum, would add a sentence to the effect that France “guarantees the preservation of the environment and biological diversity and fights against climate change.”The right has expressed opposition to the change. It still has to be reviewed by the right-leaning Senate. Another bill sets out possible reforms for a greener future that include banning advertisements for fossil fuels and eliminating some short-haul domestic flights.Mr. Doucet is unimpressed. “Macron is not an ecologist. He is a modern conservative. He knows there’s a problem, so he is ready to make some changes, but he does not measure the size of the problem. Can you tell me one strong step he has taken?”For now, the meatless Lyon school lunches are still being served. Children seem just fine. Last week, a Lyon administrative court rejected an attempt by some parents, agricultural unions and local conservative politicians to overturn the mayor’s decision, ruling that the “temporary simplification” of school menus did not pose a health risk to children.Mr. Doucet says that when the health crisis eases, but not before, he will be able to offer a choice of school menus again, including meat. Meanwhile, Mr. Denormandie, the agriculture minister, has asked the prefect in the Lyon area to look into the legality of dropping meat.Eggs and fish are still being served in school canteens in Lyon.Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times“Mr. Denormandie’s accusation that we are antisocial is a lie,” Mr. Doucet told me. “He said we were denying meat to the poorest people with the most precarious existences, which is false. He should have been fired at once.”Boris Charetiers, a member of a parents’ association, said the mayor was being closely watched. “We are vigilant,” he said. “We don’t want this to be a definitive decision. Our children cannot be hostages to ecological political conviction.”As for Mr. Teixeira, the butcher, he cast his eye appreciatively over the vast selection of meat. “We have canine teeth for a reason,” he said.Gaëlle Fournier contributed reporting from Paris. More