Jennifer Surrette rarely hits a fast-food drive-thru, but the other day the 28-year-old Halifax schoolteacher found herself rushed and in a lunch-time lineup at Burger King.

A vegetarian for the past 10 years and a vegan for five, Ms. Surrette, who counsels kids as young as elementary-school age about vegetarianism, was keen on a meatless burger as she idled behind a pickup truck loaded with four ravenous, male construction workers.

"I totally expected to hear 'Whopper, Whopper, Whopper, Whopper' from their window, and I thought I was hearing things when they all ordered veggie burgers," she says. "It was unbelievable and wonderful. I was sitting in my car cheering."

No longer the sole orbit of middle-aged ex-hippies, fanatical animal-rights activists, anemic health nuts and flaky movie stars, vegetarianism today is embraced by a wide assortment of people. And they are being converted younger than ever.

Lisa of The Simpsons isn't the only eight-year-old who shuns meat. These days, hordes of university students, teenagers and even children go vegetarian for political, environmental and health reasons, embracing our furry and feathered friends and slashing their risks of nasty conditions such as heart disease, cancer and obesity in the process, all while their parents watch from across the dinner table.

This week, the vegetarian movement got a sanguine shot in the arm when a cow on a farm in Grand Prairie, Alta., was found to have the brain-wasting bovine spongiform encephalopathy — mad-cow disease.

Ms. Surrette, who gave up meat when she was "18, young and impressionable," says the only surprise in the news for her was that it hadn't happened sooner. "Watching the beef markets go down and the soy prices go up, I couldn't help but chuckle a little," she admitted. "But it's an awful situation for people who rely on the beef industry."

That industry, worth $30-billion annually to the Canadian economy, is in mad-cow chaos. The cattle trade has ground to a halt. Stock prices are in free-fall. The United States does not want a morsel of our meat.

Are the vegetarians — the slim, smart and smug who haven't touched the stuff in years — saying, 'We told you so?' Worse, are our own children wagging their fingers at us, tsk-tsking our steak tartare?

These days, the vegetarians look like the clever ones, living healthy, self-satisfied lives, out ahead of the curve. And then there are those who are way, way ahead of the curve — such as six-year-old Anya Goff of Toronto, who went vegetarian not long ago after watching a bird collide with an SUV.

"I was in kindergarten, walking home with my dad," says Anya, as precocious and bright as Matt Groening's yellow-skinned cartoon prodigy. "This bird was on the road and a car came and it died. I cried a lot. So that's why I choose to be vegetarian."

Her rejection of meat comes from the heart. "It's cruel for animals to die," she says. "Their family wants them there. Next thing you know, they don't have part of their family. . . . Why do people want to kill animals when they're almost the same as humans? Everyone says, 'I don't know.' "

Also like Lisa Simpson, Anya is the only vegetarian in her family — eating rice, salads, pizza with just cheese, while her parents and 10-year-old brother continue to eat meat.

Still, her parents support her decision. Her father, Jules, recalls the day that bird died. "She was inconsolable," he says.

"Every time I go to the meat store, there's hanging pigs, the bodies of dead animals," Anya says. "Very bad. I close my eyes."
Only an estimated 4 per cent of Canadians consider themselves vegetarians, according to the Ottawa-based National Institute of Nutrition, with the youngest and oldest most likely to put themselves in that category. Around the world, roughly 19,000 people a day turn vegetarian, though not all stick with it.

"At that rate, it would still take 800 years for the whole world to go vegetarian," Ms. Surrette sighed. "There's still such a small number of us."

Yet vegetarianism "is becoming more prevalent in the lives of Canadians," according to Linda Robbins, who monitors consumer food trends at the federal government's Food Bureau. "Canadians aren't abandoning meat, but they're eating meat less often and having other kinds of protein sources."

A recent study by the Beef Information Centre suggests that over the past five years about 30 per cent of Canadians have reduced the amount of meat they eat.

And where there is a trend, there is a salivating marketer. Virtually every grocery store, even in small towns, now boasts a separate section of what at one time would have been sneered at as merely "health foods." The Ardmore Tearoom, a legendary Halifax greasy spoon, recently added veggie burgers to their meat-heavy menu - two waitresses there are vegans (who shun animal byproducts of every kind).

McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food joints, eager to capitalize on the trend toward a meat-free existence, have introduced vegetarian fare to their menus over the past year. (McDonald's this week also hastily dumped a promotion campaign it had just launched - using pure Alberta beef suddenly wasn't such a selling point.)

There is even an on-line dating site strictly for vegetarians around the world. Veggiedate.com bursts with nearly 11,000 personal ads for people who shun meat, including more than 2,200 Canadian men alone.

Meanwhile, in Montreal, the regulars at Les Vivres vegan restaurant were wearing a we-told-you-so look as they feasted on their miso-potato soup and organic-sprout-and-carrot sandwiches one afternoon this week.

These glowing young ectomorphs see the mad-cow outbreak as nature's way of saying, Gotcha. "It's so obvious," says Kat Leblond, 27, who had just downed a Veggie Lox sandwich. "Mass production in the meat industry is so corrupt that weird things happen, and Mother Earth gets revenge."

Les Vivres, which translates loosely as "The Essentials," dishes out organic vegan fare from its stripped-down premises in the trendy Plateau Mont Royal district. The clientele is mixed, from middle-aged heart patients to a trio of self-avowed carnivores who were tucking into massive sandwiches made with seitan, a meat substitute derived from wheat gluten.

But this vegetarian shrine finds many followers among the younger generation of social activists, environmentalists and antiglobalization demonstrators in Montreal.

Co-owner Michael Makhan, 26, says that after a Montreal street protest, it's tough to get a seat. "Montreal is a politically charged city," he says, "and a lot of these people are definitely not consuming a lot of meat. After protests, we find business goes up."

For many, including Mr. Makhan himself, going veggie is part political act, part health choice and part act of compassion toward animals.

He grew up on hamburgers, chicken and standard carnivore fare on a homestead in rural Nova Scotia. A girlfriend turned him on to meatlessness when he was 17. Eventually, he went vegan.

"The food here comes from a place that people trust," he says. "People here don't eat at McDonald's. People don't trust McDonald's. How can you trust McDonald's?"

That independent cast of mind seems to be typical of young vegetarians - for many, it is a way to carve out their own identity, and today's parents allow it because they don't want to squelch kids' self-expression.

Kira Evenson of Toronto, now 15, was on her way to the Canadian National Exhibition a few years back when she saw a truck destined for an abattoir. "It was a truck full of pigs," she said. "My dad told me they were going to be made into meat. I was astonished at how cruel it was."

But it was involvement in the animal-rights movement that fuelled her passion. "I went to a vegan potluck and they showed a video called Meet Your Meat," she says, munching an after-school apple. "It showed everything that goes on in the slaughterhouse. It was really hard to watch. Baby cows in crates. Chickens get their beaks cut off. It really upset me."

Now, it's a full-blown way of life. She is a sponge for facts about animal cruelty and attends animal-rights meetings regularly. On the telephone, she reaches for pamphlets and rattles off non-vegan offenders: Skittles! Pop Tarts! Many wines and beers! She can also hold forth on the watering down of Bill C-10, the federal legislation on cruelty to animals.

But no one else in her family is vegetarian, and at home she doesn't play the crusader. "I wanted to be vegetarian when I was younger, but I wasn't allowed because I couldn't cook for myself," she says. "Now, it's not a problem at all. And I don't bother my family about eating meat."

Like many of her peers, she is an enthusiast, not an extremist.

"It's a personal thing for me," says Ali Weinstein, 17 and also in Toronto. She became a vegetarian nearly six years ago after seeing "roasted pigs and chicken on skewers" on a family trip to Indonesia. "It would be great if no one in the world ate meat, but it's not my main reason for being vegetarian. I have found that just by being a vegetarian and not trying to influence people, they can respect that, and sometimes it influences them anyway."

On the other hand, Dr. Miriam Kaufman, of the adolescent medicine clinic at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, warned that a small number of girls - and it's mostly girls who adopt vegetarianism in their teens - do it to cover up an eating disorder. "A subsection of girls who say they're vegetarian are developing anorexia nervosa," Dr. Kaufman says. "They see vegetarianism as a way to eliminate a whole food group. And they don't replace the calories and nutrients."

At Parkview Education Centre, a high school in Bridgewater, N.S., about 10 per cent of the school's 950 students call themselves vegetarian, says retired teacher and vegan Barry Crozier, who still leads an animal-rights group at the school and talks to kids about eating a balanced diet once they switch.

"Most young people become vegetarian for ethical and environmental reasons, whereas with older folks it's usually for health," Mr. Crozier says. "With young people, it's hip to do. Most have a sound grounding for why they're doing it. They've already been affected by some other animal issue - the circus, or fur. They move their consciousness onto the food.

"It's tough, because some parents see it as a form of rebellion. I don't think it is, and even if it were, would they rather have their kid on the street corner with a needle in their arm? But once the parents reach a comfort level with it, the rest of the family usually ends up eating less meat."

That's what happened in Misha Buob's family. The 20-year-old from Caledon, Ont., managed to shift his whole family to vegetarianism after becoming one himself a couple of years ago, and eventually, turning vegan. He was looking for his identity.

Dr. Kaufman, who estimates only about 10 per cent of teenage vegetarians will stick with their choice, nonetheless sees psychological benefits for kids in carving out a set of principles for themselves.

"Being a teenager, that's a point in your life when a lot of change is happening," Mr. Buob says. "Vegetarianism can be something you stand for, and that defines you. I wanted something different to grab onto. I think that had something to do with it. It's not important to me any more, but when I was first making those decisions, that seemed kind of cool. Now, it seems like the best choice I've made."

Bob Woodsworth is the owner of Naam, Vancouver's pre-eminent and oldest vegetarian restaurant. When it was founded in 1968, the Kitsilano restaurant catered to long-haired hippies who ate only brown rice and vegetables, because they were convinced the Establishment was out to poison them.

Now, Mr. Woodsworth's customers come from all walks of life - from local police officers, who drop in for breakfast, to teenagers, television stars, grandmothers and business people.

In the past 10 years, Mr. Woodsworth has noticed an increase in the number of vegans, to about 20 per cent of his clientele. His menu offers several vegan items, but he would never restrict himself to that sort of "fanaticism," as he put it.

"I had a few items on the menu that had honey in it. I didn't realize that honey was, strictly speaking, an animal product. [Vegans] don't want any animal products whatsoever. Don't tell them that figs have little dead wasps in them," he jokes.

Vancouver is probably the most vegetarian-friendly city in Canada. Some attribute it to the weather - you don't need as much body fat in the mild climate. Or maybe, as many often joke, all the weirdos from the east eventually head west, and Vancouver is as far as they can go.

Among the city's many successful vegetarian entrepreneurs, perhaps the most famous is Yves Potvin, the original founder of Yves Veggie Cuisine - North America's leading supplier of packaged soy-based meat alternatives, including the McDonald's veggie burger, soon to hit Golden Arches outlets across the States.

The Quebec-born chef arrived in Vancouver in the early eighties, and began manufacturing faux turkey slices and hot dogs. Although a meat eater himself, Mr. Potvin realized that people were becoming more conscious of cholesterol and fat, and saw the potential market for healthy fast foods. Today, it would be hard to find a street hot-dog vendor in Vancouver that doesn't carry the Yves Famous Veggie Dog. The former one-man operation grew to have sales of $35-million in 2000, and he sold the company the following year.

Wayne and Lloyd Lockhart, meanwhile, run Choices, a market chain that stocks every soy-based, meatless, organic, wheat-free product there is, although it sells conventional non-vegetarian foods as well.

"We're not targeting vegetarians exclusively," Lloyd Lockhart says. "But you could be vegetarian, and I'm not, and we can still shop together. It's all about providing choice."

The stores even have a nutritional consultant on staff, who can advise you on the best way of eating rice bread. (Toast it, he says. It tastes better.)

A typically atypical Choices customer is Jonathan Skinner, who does not fit the stereotype of a musty, old hippie vegan. He's a 26-year-old skateboarder who works as a programmer for a video-game company - where he is currently developing a vegetarian-friendly video game called Steer Madness. He is also the founder of Vegan Voices (www.veganvoices.org), a youth-based, animal-welfare and vegan-support group.

Four years ago, Mr. Skinner was a proud meat-eating Calgarian. "In Alberta, everybody eats beef. I had a friend who was vegetarian and I used to tease him about his tofu."

Then he saw a scene in a meat-processing plant in the David Cronenberg movie eXistenz - which otherwise has nothing to do with vegetarianism. "The main character lost control and starting cutting up all these little three-headed creatures. That's when it really clicked for me. The meat you buy in the store might all be tidy and packaged, but at one time, it was a living, breathing being. I couldn't touch meat again."

Mr. Skinner moved to Vancouver "mainly because it's so much easier to be a vegetarian here. I hear it's better in Calgary now, but then, it was really hard to eat a healthy diet. Here, they have all kinds of grocery stores - Choices and Capers - that really cater to various dietary options. And even at the corner stores, they all stock veggie burgers and tons of different kinds of soy milk. You'd be surprised how many types of soy milk there are. And every type tastes different. You really have to find one you like."

His favourite at the moment is Soy Nice Chocolate.

Vancouver vegetarians also have many options when it comes to fine dining - from Lumière (where one of the four 10-course tasting menus is strictly vegetarian) to West (where a carrot-and-mascarpone ravioli with white truffle sauce is one of the hottest-selling specials this week).

"There's just a really strong vegetarian community here," says Mr. Skinner, who plans socials with the members of Vegan Voices (now 300 members strong, mostly all under 30). The group's most important mandate is to help young vegans stay healthy by providing nutritional information. But the members also get involved in various sorts of activism, including anti-fur protests.

The group also provides support to members on its Web site: Looking for a pair of hiking boots that are animal-product free? Go to Mountain Equipment Co-op, where they stock various models from Garmont's Vegan line.

Despite all these signs of the movement's progress, though, Ms. Surrette (who has influenced her husband and sister to give up meat) wonders if a single mad cow will translate into any more vegetarians.

"It can be similar to making a New Year's resolution," she says. "As the media hype dies down, will they stick with it? Vegetarianism in Europe peaked during their mad-cow problem. Whether all those people are still vegetarians, I don't know.

"Myself, I would be fearful for my life if I ate animals. Absolutely. There's no need for it, and when it presents so many health problems and environmental atrocities, there seems to be no other solution than vegetarian. It's funny, because meat didn't disgust me when I started. I thought about it for a while, even missed it. But it becomes disgusting. It really does."