Eat­ing Animals

This whol­ly unnec­es­sary activism doc­u­men­tary is loose­ly based on the 2009 non-fic­tion book ​‘Eat­ing Ani­mals’ by upstart Amer­i­can author Jonathan Safran Foer – and, for some rea­son, appears near­ly a decade after its orig­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion. That lag is worth not­ing, as this is a polem­i­cal doc­u­men­tary that feels like it’s lost in time, a muck-rak­ing rel­ic of ama­teur videos tak­en inside indus­tri­al meat con­cerns that, while shock­ing in the extreme, are avail­able to view by most at the click of a track­pad. It’s like a Michael Moore cast-off.

For pas­sion­ate veg­ans, veg­e­tar­i­ans or those on alter­na­tive meat-free diets, every nugget of infor­ma­tion in this film will be like a con­fir­ma­tion of the scrip­tures – it’s all well and good to hear them repeat­ed now and again, but the enter­tain­ment val­ue is negligible.

Points are docked almost imme­di­ate­ly for the cloy­ing, emo­tive Muzak that bur­bles in the back­drop of vir­tu­al­ly every sequence. Farm­ers lament their deci­sion to buy into the dream of mass pro­duc­tion feed lots, only to find them­selves sad­dled with crip­pling debts and com­pet­ing with neigh­bours. As the twin­kling syn­the­sis­ers slow­ly, grad­u­al­ly rise up in the mix, it’s like watch­ing a low-rent soap opera.

What’s more upset­ting is that the mak­ers of this film don’t feel that the words being spo­ken by their var­i­ous dis­en­chant­ed and depressed sub­jects are pow­er­ful enough in their own right, and need the but­tress of ambi­ent music to unlock all the req­ui­site feels. In cin­e­mat­ic terms, it’s the equiv­a­lent of inject­ing swine with chem­i­cal steroids.

The broad mes­sage of the film is that eat­ing ani­mals is – you guessed it – not cool, and it nev­er real­ly attempts to drill any deep­er than that. Direc­tor Christo­pher Dil­lon Quinn skips between vignettes of water activists fight­ing against the pro­lif­er­a­tion of ​“pink lagoons” (dead­ly ponds filled with a ​“fae­cal mari­nade” – their words), a whistle­blow­er from inside the vivi­sec­tion indus­try, a free range turkey farmer who’s crushed by the sys­tem and oth­ers who have been locked into dis­mal low-wage farm work. There are some inter­est­ing char­ac­ters along the way, and a few snap­py sound­bites, but every note it plays is like an uncred­it­ed call­back to Eric Schlosser’s ​‘Fast Food Nation’.

The sto­ry of one farmer, Craig Watts of Fair­mount, Car­oli­na, is already well doc­u­ment­ed, as his behind-the-cur­tain video on the grotesque real­i­ties of cor­po­rate bat­tery farm­ing has already racked up many mil­lions of views online hav­ing been ced­ed to many lega­cy news out­lets. Watts infers that his life hasn’t been great since he unbur­dened him­self of these sins, but Quinn doesn’t real­ly have any inter­est in telling us what has actu­al­ly hap­pened to him or how his life has been effect­ed. The stran­gle­hold of agri-busi­ness is only seen in a short sequence in which the mak­ers are pulled over in their car by a woman in dis­count Oak­leys when attempt­ing to film a giant feed lot.

In between episodes, Natal­ie Port­man nar­rates admit­ted­ly insight­ful pas­sages from Foer’s book which act more as poet­ic inter­ludes than the film’s key focus. There are a few his­tor­i­cal seg­ments detail­ing tra­di­tion­al farm­ing tech­niques and the avian flu pan­demics of yes­ter­year, but it’s bare­ly enough orig­i­nal intel­lec­tu­al sus­te­nance to even line a hun­gry belly.