Mysteriously missing plant burgers?

Maybe you read the article about the strange disappearance of A&W’S “Beyond Meat” burger on this newspaper’s front page Wednesday. It was written by Joe O’connor, who is probably the Post’s most talented storyteller. He is so talented, in fact, that it was easy to overlook, and difficult to mind, that his A1 piece was an account of a failure in reporting — the newspaperman’s version of a negative scientific finding.

The fast-food chain introduced its meatless burger to Canada with some fanfare in July, but within weeks had just plain run out of it up here. The company, which promises to reintroduce the product before Oct. 1, offered Joe no explanation beyond “People just went crazy for our fake pea-based hamburger,” which remains bountifully available in the U.S.

The Beyond Meat burger got outstanding reviews. As O’connor suggests, it seems to have passed the “Is this something you would choose to buy and eat without necessarily being a militant or religious vegetarian” test. So A&W’S transburger may still, despite the supply-chain foulup, represent a significant step in the march toward a world of affordable massmarket meat substitutes.

This assumes, of course, that post-meat is a goal toward which the world is actually progressing. Increasing affluence has been associated with greater meat consumption for centuries, and this is still happening in the developing world. There is a prevailing assumption, somewhat along the same lines as the beleaguered theory of “peak oil,” that the world will encounter some sort of Malthusian meat limit fairly soon (even though global population growth is now expected to level off in the next century). Before long we will all be confronted with the choice of either abandoning carnivorous tastes altogether, or taking our chances with an endless parade of quasi-meat innovators.

One notices that predictions of this nature have a terrible track record in general: there are not a lot of examples in history of consumer products that were once ubiquitous but became scarce purely through depletion of some resource or other. (Although even kings no longer eat ambergris with their eggs for breakfast.) As someone whose family has cattle, I’m pretty sure there is lots of room on the prairies for more intensive meat production of all kinds. If increasing affluence in China gave us an incentive to crowd Saskatchewan with feedlots (or chicken cages or veal pens) from Estevan to Lake Athabasca, the thing could be done.

But one’s opinion on this is likely to follow from one’s moral conceptions and intuitions surrounding meat, along with vague para-scientific instincts that the capitalist lifestyle is about to cause the planet’s surface to suddenly burst into flame. Everyone is habituated to think of meat as an indulgence: physicians and two thousand years of Christian tradition are singing from the same songbook in that regard.

When you read about A&W’S error with the supply of the Beyond Meat burger, you may have wondered whether something was really different, in an unforeseeable way, in the Canadian market. Could we just have a lot more vegetarians than they do in the United States? Statistics Canada does not count vegetarians, so who would know? But the best guess at an answer appears to be “No.”

In March a Dalhousie management prof who studies the food supply, Sylvain Charlebois, commissioned a small poll and estimated that about seven per cent of Canadians are explicit vegetarians; two per cent are vegans. These figures are both consistent with polls taken in the U.S.: an August Gallup poll there yielded estimates of four per cent vegetarians and three per cent vegans.

Gallup’s report observed that these figures have held fairly steady for a long time. The proportion of the U.S. population that describes itself as vegetarian has twitched along within the 5-6 per cent range since 1999. Charlebois says that Canadian polls on the topic display the same flatness. This is a little surprising, but vegans do seem to have retained the adjective “trendy” in newspaper copy for an implausibly long time.

Charlebois’s research describes a relative explosion of specialty diets: basically, all but five or so Canadians now are either glutensensitive or have received type-2 diabetes warnings. Of course, either of these situations could leave you eating more meat as a fraction of your calorie intake, assuming you can fend off Keto Jones and Paleo Smith at the butcher shop (warning: those dudes are ripped). Even the growth in factitious child food allergies might lead a household to favour enormous piles of bacon. I have never heard of anyone being allergic to pig.

What seems inarguable from the polling evidence is that strict ethical arguments against meat-eating are not making headway with the general public. It is natural to attribute this to the feebleness of those arguments, but, then, I also think it is natural for beings made of meat to eat other meat. We do not seem to be acquiring more vegetarians, even though plausible environmentalist arguments against meat-eating have been compounded over the years, and we are all chanting Michael Pollan’s “mostly plants” mantra to ourselves. “Exclusively” remains the position of a stubborn minority.

THE BEYOND MEAT BURGER GOT OUTSTANDING REVIEWS. — COSH

WEDONOT SEEM TO BE ACQUIRING MORE VEGETARIANS.