217. Eating Animals movie review

EATING ANIMALS
Cert 12A
95 mins
BBFC advice: Contains distressing images, infrequent strong language

On Tuesday, Mrs W and I celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary.
It may have been auspicious for another reason - because this was the day that I started thinking more deeply about what I eat.
Christopher Quinn's Eating Animals stunned me. I had seen other movies which had claimed that there is cruelty in meat production but I hadn't seen anything like this.
"You mean that they aren't already dead?", asked Mrs W after I told her how a machine sweeps up live chickens and put them into a machine which rips them apart.
There were far more horrors played out during this shattering investigation of factory farming methods in the United States.
Watching fattened up chicken and cows literally sag under their own weight was heartbreaking, as was the ghastly way in which pigs were treated.
It was clear that those involved in the industry don't believe they are dealing with living beings, otherwise they wouldn't be able to blank themselves off from the suffering.
Whistleblowing farmers tell of how they are pushed into what is seen as the most efficient methods to handle America's unquenchable appetite for meat.
Put simply, free-range farming will not satisfy bellies across the 50 states, so methods have been devised to plug the enormous gap.
Eating Animals analyses the damage and threats to the environment which have been created by the solution of huge companies whose influence is so great that they go unchallenged by the US government and its agencies.
In other words, the establishment really doesn't want you to know how your meat ended up on the shelves.
To find out, I recommend watching Eating Animals but a strong stomach is required.

Reasons to watch: Lifts the lid on the meat we eat
Reasons to avoid: Distressing scenes of animal cruelty

Laughs: None
Jumps: None
Vomit: None
Nudity: None
Overall rating: 8/10

Did you know? On average, Americans ate 222.2 pounds of red meat and poultry in 2018, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, surpassing a record set in 2004. 

The final word. Christopher Quinn: "I always thought I was an educated consumer, but it turned out that I really wasn't, so it turned into an unravelling of my own dietary choices. It really changed the way I eat completely." West Word

Share this post