EDMONTON - Marina Banister knows it’s not easy to be a vegan around here.

“Meat is part of the culture of Alberta,” says the University of Alberta political science student. “I personally come from a very meat-and-potatoes, very Albertan family.”

Still, Banister, who chairs the sustainability committee of the Edmonton Youth Council, believes passionately that reducing meat consumption is critical to food sustainability. That’s why the youth advisers brought the issue this week to city council and recommended Edmonton’s municipal politicians be served only vegan or vegetarian snack platters during long meetings.

A decade ago, a little story like this wouldn’t have rated much attention.

But this is the age of social media and the online mob. When they challenged Alberta’s sacred cows, the 16 members of the youth council, who range in age from 13 to 23, found themselves in the centre of a national social media storm.

On Twitter and on media comment boards, they were derided by people across the country as “lefty loser busybodies” and “self-loathing liberal white guilt-suffering crybabies”, as “trumped-up little squirts” and “vegi-nazis.”

One particularly charming tweeter called for the murder of any councillor who voted in favour of vegan snack trays.

As a committed carnivore myself, I think it’s an inappropriate micro-managing of personal choice to compel city councillors to adopt vegan-only catering. It’s a political gesture which would ultimately mean little to our environment. Council has better ways to spend its energy. But one can make such arguments, without descending to vicious personal attacks on idealistic people.

Given the amount of time Canadian adults spend obsessing about teen cyberbullying, it was disturbing to watch the spectacle of adults taking to the Internet to gang up, dog-pile style, on well-meaning youth volunteers.

It was Banister, a striking brunette, who became the focus the most disturbing adult rage, which expressed itself in darkly sexist terms.

“It’s hard to believe the babe in the photo developed to what she is on only vegetables!!” said one National Post commenter.

‘“The babe in the photo” weighs maybe seven stone soaking wet and probably can’t stand up in a stiff wind,” replied another.

“She looks great until you get her clothes off and she proceeds to just lay there exhausted from all that walking and not eating real food,” came the next comment.

It was as if Banister personally embodied, in microcosm, all the things online trolls love most to hate. It all devolved into a post-modern witch hunt, a shocking display of social media’s power at its ugliest.

“I am 20 years old and this is my first entry into the public arena,” says Banister, ruefully reflecting on her week. “When I saw someone post, ‘Well, it’s a good thing she’s pretty, because she isn’t very smart,’ I felt bad. But after a while, I started to find the comments sort of amusing. I didn’t let them faze me.”

Other commenters, she said, attacked her for wearing makeup, suggesting she couldn’t be a serious environmentalist or real feminist if she used nail polish.

“I think seeing a young female associated with the vegan moment just changed the tone of the debate a bit,” she said. “I think if people had seen a picture of a male, if my name were Mark, not Marina, the conversation would have been different. I pride myself on being a very rational person. I’m a researcher. And anyone obsessed with my appearance or my age probably doesn’t have a lot of rational arguments to make.”