Health Sweden: Eating needles from young Christmas trees is safe
Belgian authorities have warned against eating Christmas trees. Swedish experts disagree and recommend the needles of young, untreated trees for the production of foods such as flavored butter.
09.01.2025, 06:30
SDA
The Swedish Food Safety Authority said on Wednesday that it agrees with its Belgian counterparts that store-bought Christmas trees are not suitable as food because they may have been treated with pesticides "that are not approved for edible plants".
Anneli Widenfalk, a toxicologist at the Swedish authority, explained in an email to the AFP news agency that the Swedish custom of collecting needles from young trees and using them in food is safe in limited quantities. This is usually done "in May or June, when they are still small and tender and the tree has probably not yet been treated with chemicals", she emphasized. The conifers can be used to make flavored butter, tea, syrup or to flavor alcohol.
Food authority warns of "deadly consequences"
The Belgian food safety authority AFSCA warned on Tuesday that there is "no guarantee that Christmas trees are safe for consumption by humans or animals" and advised against eating them due to the use of pesticides during cultivation.
The warning was prompted by a request from the city of Ghent to eat Christmas tree needles. The website of the city in the northern Belgian region of Flanders, which is considered a stronghold of climate protectionists, enthusiastically referred to examples from Scandinavia. One suggestion was to blanch and dry the needles in order to use them to make flavored butter - a traditional Swedish recipe.
The AFSCA in Belgium apparently didn't think much of the idea. "Christmas trees are not intended to enter the food chain," the authority said in a statement. The use of flame retardants could "even have fatal consequences", the authority warned.
Ghent city council apparently heeded the warning and changed the message on its website from "Eat your Christmas tree" to "Scandinavians eat their Christmas trees".
