The Dutch advertising standards authorities has ticked off environmental campaign group Greenpeace for exaggerating the impact of eating meat in a ready-to-use package of lessons aimed at primary school children, Dutch media have reported.

One of the slides in the presentation which teachers can show their class includes the text “Vlees = honger” [meat = hunger] and this, the Reclame Code Commissie says, is going too far.

The lessons, which state that “animals eat 50% of the harvest, so there is less food for people”, should be seen as advertising because they put over the Greenpeace message, the agency is quoted as saying by Trouw. The ruling, requested by farming organisation ZLTO, has not yet been published.

According to Trouw, the advertising body is the only group checking up on the quality of free lessons offered to schools. Schools are free to pick their teaching materials because of freedom of education rules, and inspectors are not involved either.

The sponsoring of educational programmes has been subject to a code of conduct since 2020, signed by schools, industry and the state. It says that sponsoring “must not influence the educational content” and that there must be no advertising and subjective information.

However, Reint Jan Renes, a psychology lecturer at Amsterdam’s hbo college, told Trouw that educational materials produced by Shell do contain pro-company sentiment. He has been monitoring the oil giant’s role in schools since 2016.

The lessons, he says, focus mainly on green energy projects and are less clear about Shell’s own role in global warming. This, he says is “moral licensing”.

“Shell is effectively saying ‘we are doing this well, so give us more room to do other things, which are less beneficial’,” he said. “The lessons are made for their own benefit and image.”

Expeditie Oceaan, a free package of lessons produced by Albert Heijn, won a marketing award two years ago and was promoted by television biologist Freek Vonk. But the launch, says Renes, coincided with a new sticker collection by the supermarket group, which encouraged children to get their parents to shop there.

There needs to be some sort of regulation and checks, Renes and other experts say.