To be honest, I went into this documentary thinking it would be a slightly-preachy food documentary along the lines of "Super-size Me" where we'd see people eating three meals a day and how they dealt with it. That's not what I got. This was a very depressing thing to watch first thing in the morning.
It starts off as an overly-cutesy filmmaker's journey to find her three volunteers. It segues into meeting the final candidates, and all is well... until we get to the education portion. Then it becomes a gruesome hidden-camera horror film that was extremely hard to watch.
I am a terribly empathetic person. I can't watch someone fictional cry on camera without tearing up myself, much less watch real cruelty and torture. Having a somewhat eidetic memory when it comes to imagery does not help. So I get the empathy. I get why, with all the choices out there, you can live a completely cruelty-free life. My problem with it is that veganism will make very little impact when our population is growing by forty-five million people a year on this planet. You just can't convert people that fast.
And we could go into the countering effects of congressional lobbyists for the meat industry and their history of payoffs and all the corruption of the systems of oversight, but what it really boils down to is that this planet is too crowded to return to an agrarian, sustainable system. Even if we stopped every factory farm today, took the population and divvied up the land so that each person had land for and was responsible for seeing to their own food production humanely, we wouldn't have enough.
This is not a call for GMOs. I think tinkering with the building blocks of nature is a bad idea, because in any complex system making changes can lead to unexpected effects when you don't understand every tiny aspect. And believe me, it is sheer arrogance to think we know all there is to know about genetics and gene-splicing. To introduce that kind of thing into our gene pool before we do is idiotic.
Before I get too preachy (too late), let me just say that while the filmmaker's intent was good, it was too short and too shallow to be of any real service to anyone but those who are already converted. But I didn't really care for the film because of my own reaction to the visceral imagery, and my doubt at its effectiveness.
As a crafter's background noise, it was fine. I really got to concentrate on my knitting when the slaughterhouse sequences came up, and the verbal nature of documentaries is always good for thought-provoking material while your hands are busy. Two laugh out loud moments, mostly at Tesla and her family. However I wouldn't recommend this as anything but a streaming video choice, as I found it unsettling how it switched from light-hearted to deadly with very little warning. Three out of five stars.
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