This Sunday, two environmental activists poured soup on the armored glass protecting the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, justifying their actions as a desire to promote “the right to healthy and sustainable food.”
The world’s most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci, has been displayed behind protective glass since 2005 and has been vandalized several times.
For example, in May 2022, he became the subject of a cream pie.
Video posted on social media shows two women with the words “Food Riposte” on their T-shirts walking under a security barrier to approach the painting and throwing soup into a glass protecting Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece.
“What’s more important?” – they shouted. “Art or the right to healthy and sustainable food?
“Our agricultural system is sick. Our farmers are dying on the job,” they added.
Louvre staff were seen placing black panels in front of the Mona Lisa and asking visitors to leave the hall.
On its website, the group Food Riposte says the French government is breaking its climate commitments and calls for the creation of a public health system equivalent to a national one so that people have better access to healthy food and, at the same time, that farmers have decent income.
For days now, French farmers have been using their tractors to block roads and slow down traffic across France, seeking better rewards for their produce, less bureaucracy and protection from imports.
They also dumped agricultural waste at the doors of government offices.
On Friday the government announced a series of measures that farmers say do not fully meet their demands, including a “radical simplification” of some technical procedures and the progressive elimination of taxes on diesel fuel for agricultural machinery.
Some farmers have threatened to gather in Paris starting Monday to block main roads leading into the capital.
New Prime Minister Gabriel Attal visited a farm in the central Indre-et-Loire region this Sunday and acknowledged that farmers are in a difficult situation.
“On the one hand we say, ‘we want quality,’ and on the other hand, we want lower and lower prices,” he said, believing that it is necessary to “find solutions in the short, medium and long term.”
Attal also said his government was considering “additional” measures against what he called “unfair competition” from other countries that have different production rules and import food into France.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
I am Michael Melvin, an experienced news writer with a passion for uncovering stories and bringing them to the public. I have been working in the news industry for over five years now, and my work has been published on multiple websites. As an author at 24 News Reporters, I cover world section of current events stories that are both informative and captivating to read.