StoryThe meat of tomorrow (2/4). This summer, “M” tells the story of a food revolution. Second part at the time of the hippies, where the seeds of this change were sown. By a charismatic guru, an environmental activist, the inventor of the vegetarian burger… So many pioneers today worried about the capitalist turn of their utopia.
Impossible to escape the smell of death. She clings to the village of Boxtel, in North Brabant, in the south of the Netherlands. The village hosts the largest slaughterhouse in the country and its huge chimney: around 20,000 pigs enter it every day, to be put to death. The appeals to close this factory have multiplied for months, through the Close Vion group – named after the Dutch meat empire in charge of exploitation (4,500 employees, $ 4.9 billion in turnover in 2020).
” We are fighting “, says Jan Juffermans, via Zoom, at the beginning of June. Known throughout the country, the activist has always fought on several fronts: to impose a tax on meat, alongside the collective True Animal Protein Price Coalition; against a bank accused of having financed several polluting companies, with the radical environmental activists of Extinction Rebellion; or, two years earlier, for the organization of a (vegetable) meal of harmony between the local breeders and the activists of the “transition coalition”.
At 76, Jan Juffermans is the oldest and most respected activist in the area. To understand the aura of this grandfather with the delicate smile, we have to go back to the early 1970s. An era that saw the emergence, in Europe and the United States, of the pioneers of a world free from meat. Jan Juffermans was then a young graduate. He has just joined a small publishing house in Leiden, near The Hague.
“The start of a great discussion”
His free time is devoted entirely to reading about the development and the way the world works. Until 1972 and the publication by the Club of Rome, a think tank, of a report on the environmental consequences of economic growth (The limits of growth). The young man is frightened by this global warming already underway, to the point of asking himself a fundamental question: “Is that going to be my future?” “
He wants to act. According to him, the most absurd is the production of meat. Jan Juffermans admires the agronomist René Dumont, French pioneer of political ecology, the first green candidate for the presidential election, in 1974 (1.3% of the vote in the first round). “Before the United Nations, he explained how meat consumers were real modern cannibals, ready to let the world die, and the others, to feed themselves”, approves Jan Juffermans.
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