I finally saw Forks over Knives this weekend.
The documentary, aimed at promoting a vegan, whole foods diet, came to my attention when both Ozzy Osbourne (of bat-eating fame) and Russell Brand announced their conversions to veganism in the wake of seeing this film.
I needed no more encouragement to see it.
But, though I eat primarily a vegan, whole foods diet, I didn’t find the film compelling. Maybe I’m a tough audience, but the movie didn’t answer my biggest questions about meat and why people shouldn’t eat it. And it said virtually nothing about why we should be eating whole foods.
Powerful poster, and apparently a powerful documentary. I’m just not sure it tells the whole story.
Basically, it just told us that meat causes cancer and so we shouldn’t eat it.
Now, I think the statistics are pretty clear on the link between the meat we eat today and certain types of cancer. Since reading John Robbins’ Food Revolution a year or two ago, I’ve recognized this link. Dr. Dean Ornish (most recently popularized by Bill Clinton’s turn to veganism) has been spewing facts about the link for years. There also seems to be a link between the meat we eat today and heat disease. For all these reasons, I had cut back on meat consumption even before Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals turned me fully vegan in the blink of an eye.
But note that when talking about the link between meat and cancer and heart disease, I refer to it as “the meat we eat today.” This is because the meat (and other animal products) we eat today isn’t the same as the meat our ancestors ate (as recently as our grandparents). Today’s cows are fed corn, not grass. And this changes the nutritional composition of the beef and dairy products that come from them. The meat is now more inflammatory, and has different chemical properties. The same can be said of chickens, which used to roam the farm and eat bugs but now are fed corn, soybeans and rendered animal protein. Our food animals’ diets change, our diets change.
And the big question for me (which Forks over Knives didn’t answer) is, does all meat cause cancer and heart disease, or does industrially produced meat cause cancer and heart disease?
For instance, one piece of evidence the documentary cites against meat consumption is that wealthy Filipinos of the early 20th century, who would eat meat, experienced far higher rates of cancer and heart disease than the poor Filipinos of the same time. Fine. But how was that meat produced? Did the cows graze the pasture, eating their traditional diets? Or did they live off corn?
I ask in part because Gary Taubes, in his book, Good Calories Bad Calories, notes that the Masai in Tanzania and Kenya live exclusively off of cows: cow’s blood, cow’s milk and cow. (They even make their homes in part from cow dung.) And yet they have virtually no incidence of heart disease or cancer. (Interestingly, their arteries do build up plaques, but, in the absence of the type of inflammation that modern meat causes, they do not seem ever to have heart attacks or strokes.)
If what Taubes says is true, then there may be little health harm to the consumption of traditionally raised meats. And this is a very different story than the one told in Forks over Knives; not that Forks over Knives is wrong, but simply not specific enough.
It’s an issue I wish the film would have addressed. (I’d also have loved for them to have told us why we should eat exclusively whole foods. I agree with this position but the film gives little sign of why they take it.)
So, though I value the purpose behind the film, I am left with much the same reaction I had to films like Fahrenheit 9/11 that make a lot of noise about how something is bad, but offer little concrete proof, few concrete connections and sparse specifics. Maybe the two youthful (but by no means young), energetic and honorable men who spurred the research and practice behind the concepts espoused in the film can offer some additional guidance to those of us left by this documentary wanting something more.
