Remembering Meet Your Meat

Last year, I was working on an article which highlighted a wide range of activists and how they initially came to the animal movement. One thing I found particularly interesting while I was researching the piece was the way in which certain books, music and films were touchstones for campaigners of certain generations. For instance, if you were a Generation X activist, there’s a pretty good chance you were radicalized by a straightedge band.

Of course, people are influenced by an assortment of things. Narrowing these down to a single piece of media is reductive. Still, I was fascinated to discover how many campaigners who are approximately my age were introduced to the horrors of industrial animal agriculture through the 2002 documentary Meet Your Meat. Produced by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the 12-minute film included undercover footage narrated by actor Alec Baldwin.

As an example, here’s former North American Animal Liberation Front Press Office spokesperson Nicoal Sheen discussing the movie in an interview on the Meatless Movement website: “I went ethically vegetarian in high school after a friend showed me PETA’s Meet Your Meat one day after school. For the first time in my life, I witnessed the horrid, gritty reality of factory farming. I was shocked.” She would go vegan a few years later, in her freshman year of college.

I had a long, on-again-off-again journey to a plant-based diet. As I suggested, a confluence of factors led me there. Perhaps the most significant of these was my mother’s deeply passionate, but omnivorous animal welfarism, which I found internally inconsistent. Another was her battered copy of Peter Singer’s 1975 classic Animal Liberation, that, if I recall correctly, I read in my senior year of high school. Around the same time, though, I saw Meet Your Meat.

My hometown had two video stores, one of which, Lake Placid Video, was owned by Beth Paolini, who I was sad to learn has since passed away, after a hard-fought battle with cancer. The store featured a huge television monitor, sitting on the floor, which would play the latest offerings available. The DVD case for Meet Your Meat was balanced on top of the monitor, in some type of stand, attached to a handwritten sign explaining this was a free rental.

Thinking back now, I wonder why Paolini stocked the documentary, let alone provided it such a prominent location. The film wasn’t earning her any money and the subject matter was off-putting. Had Paolini ordered the movie? Or had it somehow arrived in the mail, unsolicited and without charge? While I have little evidence to back this up, beyond the photo in her obituary, which showed her cradling a kitten, I suspect she may have had some sympathy with PETA’s aims.

I took the documentary home and watched it. Growing up on a small farm, industrial agriculture was a semi-regular topic of conversation, as we compared it unfavorably to how we treated our animals. Still, while I’d read some about factory farms, and heard them described, I don’t believe I’d ever seen footage like this before. I would come to believe all animal exploitation is a grave wrong, but the scenes in Meet Your Meat were an unmistakable view into hell on earth.

After I saw the film, I asked my environmental-science teacher if I could show it in his class. He agreed. So, one day, I screened the movie for my peers. The reaction I recall most clearly was a girl I had a crush on walking out in disgust. I’m not sure if this should be understood as a success or not! Maybe the footage stuck with her and inspired an ethical reassessment of some kind. Unfortunately, I’ve come to realize individual change is rarely so easy and always insufficient.

I should note the documentary was directed by Bruce Friedrich and Cem Akin. The former man was a PETA leader who has since gone on to head the Good Food Institute, the premier nonprofit dedicated to advancing cellular agriculture. Accelerating this technology’s development is the focus of my grassroots activism. While Friedrich and I have certain strategic disagreements, I have profound respect and gratitude for his tireless efforts on behalf of animals.

I first watched Meet Your Meat some years after its 2002 release — either in late 2004 or early 2005. The film would soon be overshadowed by Shaun Monson’s Earthlings, a nonfiction feature which debuted in the fall of 2005, and became the preferred documentary of its kind in the animal movement. So the importance of Friedrich and Akin’s work to my political development is to some extent a marker of when I became interested in nonhuman rights.