Friday, January 18, 2013
Get "Vegucated" about the real low-fat diet (and ethics, and protecting the environment, too)
In “Vegucated”
(directed by Marisa Miller Wolfson), a young woman recruits three other
New Yorkers to go on a vegan diet, for both health and perhaps ethical reasons.
One of the three (Brian Flegel) works as
a bartender. Vegan dietary rules are
stricter than vegetarian.
The tag team goes on a road trip, visiting corporate and
smaller family farms (it appears, in upstate New York) to see how farm animals
and poultry are treated.
Bottom-line pressures have forced agriculture to treat
animals very badly, to say the least, and there are workarounds pertaining to
animal cruelty laws. Milk cows are
impregnated artificially and their calves are taken away. Pigs (and piglets) are treated pretty much as
in the 1995 Australian black comedy “Babe” (a film that gets mentioned). Poultry
is herded by machines that often amputate body parts.
The film also maintains that meat production and consumption
puts more carbon into the atmosphere than fossil fuel use in cars. I would question that. It also suggests that bovine flatulence,
which exudes methane, adds to greenhouse gasses. But global temperatures didn’t rise until the
20th Century, centuries and millennia after animals were
domesticated. The film correctly says
that domestication of animals for consumption increased as humans moved into
colder climates in prehistoric and ancient times.
At the end of the film, the trio takes a health physical,
showing weight loss and reduction of blood pressure, without the need for
medication.
Former president Bill Clinton is a big advocate of the vegan
diet, and most formal dinner events offer vegan menus. Often a Portobello mushroom substitutes for
meat. One food mentioned in the film is tofu,
a soy product. An intentional community
in central Virginia called “Twin Oaks” manufactures tofu as one of its
businesses (issues blog, April 7, 2012).
There reports that Adam Lanza, reported as the shooter at Newtown, had insisted on a vegan diet in order not to cause the deaths of animals -- and yet he suddenly did what he did.
The official site for this “completely independent film” is here.
The film plays full-screen from Netflix Instant play.
There was a vegan restaurant on 17th Street in
Washington DC, between JR’s and the First Baptist Church, that served delicious
meals but it has closed.
Pictures: from Twin Oaks, VA (my one-day visit, April, 2012).
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