To beef or not to beef

Wow. What a week and a long weekend... The rich people's submersible drama and the tragedy and inhumanity of the Mediterranean refugee crossings were brought together in a sharp contrast. Something happened in Russia, but it's not clear at all what and why and nobody knows what it means. The fires continue to burn in Quebec and Alberta and the weather yo-yos in St. John's as it usually does in June. The spring lasted for the entire afternoon. In the morning, there were no leaves on trees, and in the afternoon the Rennie's River was lush. I am grateful to the river for the reprieve it offers in times of news whiplashes.

Last week, through an organization I volunteer for, I participated in a discussion helping an environmental organization shape a new program they are proposing to roll out soon. Basically, this organization is starting a campaign encouraging people to stop or at least drastically reduce the amount of beef they eat. There are good reasons to actually do that in terms of health outcomes as well as climate change impacts given the footprint of the cattle industry as a percentage of land use and the amount of greenhouse gases, especially methane, that it emits. But these kinds of campaigns always rub me the wrong way.

They rarely seem to take into account that there is a social justice issue at play here. Yes, meat is expensive, but dollar for dollar, a fast-food burger is probably going to fill you up better than other options. There is no need to compound additional guilt on top of being poor and eating unhealthy diet because you can't really afford the ingredients and the time that it would take to change it. For the rest of us, yes we all bear individual responsibility for climate change action. Changes in diet, how we get around, how we invest our money, who we bank with and a myriad of other decisions would all have an impact. We will need to change what we expect a good life to be - it will be better, I think, but it will need to be defined differently than just through material positions. But, and it's a big but, it is disingenuous to shift all that responsibility onto individuals.

We need to get off fossil fuels, we need massive regulatory changes, we need massive retraining initiatives and public works, we need serious consequences for polluters and we need to accept that we simply can't have some things that we take for granted. There should probably be no cruise ships on the seas, we should probably figure out how to make individual car ownership a thing of the past, we need to figure what food supply looks like, in fact, what do supply chains look like for just about anything we make. These are big, thorny problems we are running out of time to solve and we can't really do much about them as individuals. These are also scary conversations that we need to have as citizens, but the action will need to be collective.

I am more interested in a whole other conversation that seems to make a lot of people uncomfortable and beef consumption is a perfect example of it. Beef consumption is more than just about food and land use and methane. It is also about difficult, intangible things that matter - things like identity and culture. They matter a lot. In North America, large parts of South America and in many other parts of the world, cultural traditions such as barbecue, outdoor gatherings, and community events are intricately linked to beef consumption even in places like Newfoundland that does not base its cultural identity on, for example, ranching. If you lived out West, and I did for years, the cultural impact of telling somebody the lifestyle they base their entire identity on is harmful to the planet is enormous. Many, many cattle producers, large industrial ones and smaller family ones, see themselves as stewards of the land. We can argue forever why that is not so, but that's not the point. We will need to have careful and complicated conversations about identity, and history, and culture, and the future. I think that innate sense of care for the land may be a good starting point. We are not going to get anywhere attacking someone’s sense of who they are.

And of course that goes just as well for oil and gas workers and many others who needed to root themselves in occupations that are hard and dangerous, but occupations they saw as building a future for all of us and one they could be proud of. It turned out that was not true, but it doesn't make them evil (CEOs and marketing and PR shills are a whole other issue - no sympathy there whatsoever).