Gov. Jared Polis sees a future for Colorado with fewer meats and more profits, he said Thursday while dining on a Burger King Impossible Whopper in his office at the Capitol.
The Democratic governor — who eats meat but is married to a vegan — caught the attention of state Department of Agriculture staff at a new lab in Broomfield this week when he asked them to think about going meatless. He said he would buy an Impossible Burger for the roughly 100 employees at the research facility that opened this spring.
Polis discussed his thoughts on the subject over meatless burgers with Colorado Politics on Thursday.
His goal isn’t to kill the livestock industry but to encourage the agriculture staff and community to see the future, just as he says he’s done with trends in marijuana, hemp, blockchain technology and health care services.
“We want to make sure the future works for us across everything we do,” Polis said. Without specific directives, he asked the Department of Agriculture to start thinking about ways to include meatless products made with Colorado farm products as they go about their regular work.
“Everything that’s in this was grown on a farm,” he said between bites of his burger. He’s not planning to bury beef, pork or poultry, but the tech millionaire says Colorado would be foolish to ignore the meatless trend that he expects will soon be an economic trend as well. The move isn’t likely to go over well in some meat-loving sectors of Colorado.
“It makes my blood boil,” said Republican state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling, a cattleman who sits on the Democratic-led Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee.
He said Polis’ declaration “escalates the war on rural Colorado,” and it could drive more people in livestock-producing parts of the state to drive a recall petition underway against Polis.
“It just floors me that he would go to the Department of Agriculture, of all places, and say something like that,” Sonnenberg said...
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