‘Eating Animals’ reveals what’s on your plate
One of the most memorable segments from “Eating Animals” delves into the history of Colonel Harland Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The documentary, based off a memoir of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer, states that a pressure cooker saved time and resources, meeting high demands that even Sanders met with difficulty.
He sells his company under the impression that the product’s quality would stay the same. Fast forward past his death, when the industry no longer focuses on quality, and a man who looks like Colonel Sanders stars in a commercial and says “I’ve been gone for a while and boy, howdy, have things changed.” And they have indeed.
Does anyone truly know the story behind the meat on our plates?
“Eating Animals” does, and it tells us by vividly showing agriculture’s focus on cheap efficiency and the lack of traditional farming.
From this film, viewers will see a never-ending domino effect on agriculture’s effect on the environment, quality in produce and overall health of the animals and the humans that consume them.
Natalie Portman wonderfully narrates the documentary as it takes viewers across America and once into China to support the argument that small business farmers suffer from the high demands of corporations.
In Kansas, a farmer runs a free-range poultry farm where the birds appear to bask in the sunlight. But in North Carolina, another farmer raises genetically
modified chickens that can’t stand up in a dark and cramped facility.
The feature is similar to 2008’s “Food, Inc.,” but “Eating Animals” drives its message to the audience through comparing facts about traditional and industrial farming’s effect on meat instead of through animal cruelty shock value.
But don’t expect to see no animal cruelty. There are clips of livestock being beaten, slaughtered and gutted; it’s brutal but effective.
It’s also engaging with good visuals throughout the film from a captivating graphic on genetically modified changes in chickens over time, to colorful (or dark, depending on the mood) wide shots of farms that make our world look vast.
To further counter the cold conveyor belt factories, “Eating Animals” brings heart to farmers who raise livestock on traditional values by showing how emotional they would get when sending their animals to the slaughterhouse.
Watching a farmer choke back tears while talking about the animals he raised makes you empathize with this stranger.
Someone states the need for a “change in the entire system” if something is to be done.
Maybe change can start by watching this film.