It was the city of Ghent in Flanders in Belgium that a few days ago gave tips to its residents on what they could do with their Christmas tree to avoid throwing it away and thus reduce the city’s waste.
One of the tips was about using the bar in different recipes, reports Euronews. This, claims the city management, is inspired by recipes from Scandinavia.
“In Scandinavia, this has been done for a long time: the bar is removed from the branches, and then lightly boiled, put in a sieve and then dried on a clean towel. When the pine nuts have dried, you can make delicious pine nut butter to put on your bread or sandwich,” the municipality wrote on its website.
Warns against eating pine needles
This sent employees at the Belgian equivalent of the Food and Beverage Authority, Belgium’s federal food authority, into a frenzy. The authority has published a warning that the firs are sprayed with chemicals, which can be dangerous to ingest.
“It is not intended that Christmas trees end up in the food chain,” they write in the warning.
In Efter fem, Didrik Vanhoenacke, on-call biologist at the National Museum of Natural History and half-Belgian, comments on the call.
– It is true that many of the cultivated firs are sprayed quite a lot, and then it might not be so good to eat those needles. They had actually checked before Christmas with Danish Christmas tree growers and then it was half of them who also used pesticides, which contain PFAS, high-fluorine substances like this that never break down in nature and so can harm both people and the environment.
“Bad tip” from the city of Ghent
He says that it is therefore a bad idea to “chew your Christmas tree” if you do not know that it is certified and unsprayed or if you have bought a grown tree that you did not cut down yourself.
– If you have brought in a spruce from your own forest, for example, or if you have a certified spruce and it would feel so good that it shoots new shoots, then there is no problem eating them, says Vanhoenacke.
He himself says that he doesn’t think pine needles are that good.
– You can make spruce syrup if you mix sugar and spruce needles and put it in the window, or you can make spruce oil and then it’s still quite a nice condiment. But to just chew the shots as they are… somewhat occasional maybe but I’m not a tree victim that way, says Didrik Vanhoenacke.