Can you enjoy summer without hamburger? It's worth it to try

At lunchtime, during the giant tech conference held this week in Toronto, Collision, you had to fight your way through the long line of people waiting to buy a hamburger in order to get to the area where hamburgers were denounced. The hamburgers smelled delicious, the burning promise of a summer to come and I almost stopped myself to buy one. But I ignored the sirens singing and I took my stomach that rumbled to the Planet Tech stage where preached burger-bashers.

"Stop eating beef," said Terry Tamminen of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation from the stage. "Do it today." He was talking about the fire alarm, which provided another useful metaphor: The climate crisis, he says, "equates to a room filled with smoke every day."

The message, speaker after speaker, was the same. Do you like the planet? Stop eating meat. If you can not – if darling is your striploin, if you want lamb – eat less. "I became vegan two years ago," said Roger Royse, a lawyer at a panel on agricultural innovation, "and I come from North Dakota."

Josh Tetrick has staged his vision of a world without hens, or at least a world where hens live without fear for their necks. Its mung bean egg substitute, Just Egg, mingles with reality and is available in high-end grocery stores. Evan Williams, Twitter's pescetarian co-founder and a man who has become even richer thanks to his investment in herbal meat substitute Beyond Meat, spoke of the benefits of "positive global investment".

Peas are the new gold and the streets of Silicon Valley are paved. Tiny legumes from an alchemy evoked in a food science laboratory form the basis of the delicious Beyond Meat burger patties. And I do not mean delicious, as in "pretty good for something that you have scraped from the bottom of the compost bin", but in fact, it's nice to go back for a second. Earlier this month, in the CNBC business panel, a group of financial analysts who looked like escapees from the wolf of Wall Streetmarveled at the double surprise of Beyond Meat's stellar IPO, and that a meal could be tasty without meat. "I was shocked to see how delicious it was," said one of them.

Those were guys who seemed to be normally having an eye on Peter Luger, so I was shocked to hear him too. That echoed what Mr. Royse said: If a guy from the heart of a country who eats an average of 26 kilograms of beef per person per year, where the bee is close to godliness – if that guy can become vegan , everyone can.

We must eat less meat to save the planet. As the World Resources Institute explains, "Beef production uses 20 times more land and emits 20 times more producer bean emissions, per gram of protein." Joseph Poore, an academic who led a landmark study from Oxford University, detailed the cost of animal agriculture, told The Guardian newspaper: "A vegan diet is probably the most effective way to reduce your impact on the planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but also acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use around the world ".

Canada's new Food Guide, in a discreet Canadian way, suggests putting more plants on the plate. Inventing meat substitutes is a license to print money, as shown by Beyond Beef's experience. Convenience is not an excuse either: you can buy a faux sausage cake at many Tim Horton's stores this summer and a vegan pizza at the Calgary Stampede.

Nevertheless, many cultural obstacles prevent a less carnivorous world. A growing global middle class needs animal protein, as recently summarized The Economist: "In rich countries, people become vegan for January and pour oatmeal on their cereals for small -lunch. Around the world, the trend is reversed. Between 2017 and 2017, world meat consumption increased by 1.9% on average per year and fresh dairy consumption by 2.1%. "

Then there are the challenges presented by a culture that associates meat consumption with some type of old-fashioned masculinity. A "type of meat and potatoes" is a guy that you would barbeque at your barbecue. A "soy boy", on the other hand, is the insult of the man threatened for a guy who is just a little too fond of In the United States, the fight for the revolutionary Green New Deal has been reduced to a caricature in which the pinkos attack the patriotic American refrigerators who just want to savor a meatball in peace, fucking. They want to take away your hamburgers, "said Sebastian Gorka, a former White House aide.A chopped cow with pickles seems like a strange hill on which to die, but here we are.

Social conventions change all the time, influenced by factors that may not be clear to us, we spend our day revolving around driving and dinner. Today's Ribfest is tomorrow's Portabellopallooza, and it will not seem strange at all to the young people who live there. It may not be surprising that young people are more open to diet. According to a study from Dalhousie University, almost 10% of Canadians are vegetarians or vegans, and the majority of them are under 35 years of age. Young people are also more receptive to the idea of ​​eating lab-grown meat.

Many of us are "flexitarians" who want to limit our consumption of animal protein – one-third of Canadians said they plan to eat less meat in the next six months, at the request of researchers of Dalhousie in 2018.

This is the season that tests the flexitarian's resolution. Are you worried about a summer without meat? Afraid that the spirit wills well, but the smell of grilled flesh makes it weak? I'm too. But I'll try to do better, one pie at a time.