Germany Bans Pork –Truth! & Fiction!

Germany Bans Pork –Truth! & Fiction!

Summary of eRumor:
Reports that Germany has banned pork because of the religious objections of Muslim immigrants from Syria have gone viral.
The Truth:
Germany has not banned pork — politicians there are actually talking about doing the opposite because a growing number of schools are deciding on their own to pull pork from lunch menus.
The pork flap started in early January when a politician from German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentary group spoke out about the number of schools, nurseries and public cantinas in a state in northern Germany that had removed pork from their lunch menus.
CDU parliamentary group leader Daniel Günther linked decisions to remove pork from those menus to the growing number of Muslim students who had immigrated to the state. He said at least one school in every district in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein had done so, the German newspaper Lübecker Nachrichten reported in January:

“The protection of minorities – including for religious reasons – must not mean that the majority is overruled in their free decision by ill-conceived consideration,” Günther said, arguing that tolerance also means “the appreciation and sufferance of other food cultures and lifestyles.”

“The consumption of pork belongs to our culture,” he argued, adding that those who didn’t want to eat pork didn’t have to.

“No one should be obliged to do so,” he said. “But we also don’t want the majority having to refrain from pork.

German newspaper Deutsche Welle reported that CDU’s regional arm would introduce a plan that forbids public cantinas from removing pork from menus. The newspaper also noted that the plan had been widely mocked on social media by Germans.
So, it’s not true that Germany has banned pork from school menus. It is true that a growing number of schools, nurseries and public cantinas have pulled pork from their menus, but nobody forced them to do so. And a plan unveiled by the CDC would actually do the opposite of banning pork in Germany — it would require public cantinas to apply for a pork exemption if it didn’t want to serve pork.