User Reviews

The film does a good job of showcasing some of the environmental benefits of regeneratively managed livestock when grazed in an appropriate setting. It also contributes to the ongoing public debate around the ethics of our food choices by highlighting some of the false dichotomies that grow out of a disconnect between consumers and the food systems they both rely up and critique, while also showing how, despite wider criticism of farmers for failings of land stewardship and animal welfare, many of those embracing regenerative agriculture are driven by a desire to address exactly these issues..

However, some of the good aspects of the film, were overshadowed by the attack that is mounted, on several fronts, against people who choose not to include meat and other animal products in their diets. As well as drawing attention away from the more interesting parts of the film, it also trades on over-generalisations, errors, and equivocations (an example of the latter being the strand of argument that turns around the claim that all life depends upon death).

Ironically, a number of the central arguments raised in the documentary, including a number that form part of this 'anti-vegan' thrust, also work both ways - but the film's producers either do not notice this or choose to overlook it.

Because diet is such an emotive issue, whether we're vegans (who the film target), vegetarians, omnivores, carnivores or whatever, that often becomes an important part of our identity, which can make it more difficult for us to accept evidence that contradicts the beliefs that are tied up with that, and make us more susceptibility to things like confirmation bias. Sadly a growing number of people within regenerative agriculture feel pressure to define themselves in relation to "vegans" (often a proxy not for activists who oppose the killing of animals, which would include many vegetarians as well, and members of the food industry pushing plant-based foods, ostensibly on environmental and ethical grounds, but in reality for purely economic reasons)..I do not feel that it is uncharitable to say that that is also true of those who made this film.

The film rightly pushes back against accounts of the environmental impact of different diets that vilify livestock - and ruminants in particular - while failing to distinguish between those managed regeneratively and those in conventional, industrial animal agriculture. It also highlight some of the big problems with monocrop agriculture in non-mixed systems, when they are heavily reliant upon environmentally harmful inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, etc.). But when it comes to cropping systems, it also fails to distinguish the good from the bad, the monoculture field-crop systems from the more sophisticated and environmentally regenerative permaculture, agro-ecological, agro-forestry or indigenous systems that don't necessarily incorporate livestock. We see a similar failure to think beyond the industrial agricultural paradigm in Frank Mitloehner's claims that you cannot grow crops on the two thirds of available agricultural land defined, under current systems, as marginal or non-arable - a claim which, anyone who has looked into the reasons that land is classified in the way it is, or has studied alternative and indigenous food systems, can see is clearly false..

Finally, after deconstructing the narrative that red meat drives various health problems and rightly shifting the focus onto highly processed foods instead, the film goes on to include spurious and inadequately evidences claims about plant-based diets being de facto bad for people's health. Many people can get benefits from the inclusion of some meat in their diet, but there isn't really any solid data that shows that everyone's diet MUST of necessity include meat to satisfy their nutritional requirements, or to support Zoe Harcombe wildly exaggerated claim that, it's 'only a matter of time before something in vegans' health suffers'.

I thought that this movie was beautifully made, BUT, also very slanted in one direction. I would have liked to see more scientific proof against the theory that meat is bad for us. Just because it was done for thousands of years doesn't mean it's the right way forward. Also, the ex-vegan claiming about back issues due to diet, I would have liked more info on why this happened. And also why some do thrive on vegan diets, while others have issues.

I know, and think most of us know, that processed food is not the most healthy choice, and while the idea of using a more sustainable and regenerative farming method sounds good to me in theory, I would have liked to hear more about the downsides to this type of farming. I for instance worry about the scalability and global affordability of this.