"Deadly consequences"

Belgium warns: Do not eat Christmas trees

(Bild: Liubomir - stock.adobe.com)

"Eat your Christmas tree" - the unusual request from the city of Ghent to its residents at the end of the Christmas season has brought the food safety authority AFSCA in Belgium onto the scene ...

There is "no guarantee that Christmas trees are safe to eat, either by humans or animals", the authority declared on Tuesday. In view of the probable use of pesticides during cultivation, the authority warned: "Do not eat your Christmas tree."

The background to the initiative in Ghent was less about culinary aspects than a recycling recommendation: the website of the city in the northern Belgian region of Flanders, which is considered a stronghold of climate protectors, enthusiastically referred to examples from Scandinavia. One suggestion was to peel, blanch and dry the needles in order to use them for the production of flavored butter, for example.

Not intended to enter the food chain
The AFSCA obviously didn't think much of the idea. "Christmas trees are not intended to enter the food chain," the agency said in a statement. There are many reasons "to neither promote nor support the reuse of Christmas trees in the food chain". In addition to treatment with pesticides, the authority also cited the use of flame retardants in Christmas trees, which is difficult to detect. This could "even have fatal consequences", the authority warned.

Ghent city council has apparently heeded the warning and revised the information on its website as a result. Now the headline no longer reads "Eat your Christmas tree", but "Scandinavians eat their Christmas trees".