Film review: Sacred Cow
(vs Cowspiracy)

Thin on systematic evidence, this doc prefers to tell anecdotal stories instead to support its case

By Tony Moffat

Recently I became aware of a new agrofilm called Sacred Cow by U.S. film-maker Diana Rogers. Perhaps you have seen it, too? If not, here is where you can find it: sacredcow.info/watch

The film Sacred Cow is based on a book of the same title with co-author Robb Wolf. This web site tries to lure you in with the statement: “Don’t give up meat until you learn… the REAL Truth… behind meat, your health and the environment.” Well, to tell the real REAL truth, I was easily lured well before by the opposing argument that says we should drop meat and engage in whole-food, plant-based diets for the sake of our own health, for the animals and for the planet – which I still adhere to. So, here are my comments on the film…

As we (my wife Ann & I) started watching Sacred Cow, we thought what a great idea – do as our ancestors always did: get farm animals back out into the field where they can eat tons of grass, properly fertilize the soil and feed lots of people with various concentrated nutrients, as opposed to factory animal farming, which does little or none of those things. The message in the film was also that vegans and even vegetarians cannot get all their necessary nutrients from plants alone.

Well, to tell the real REAL truth, I was easily lured well before by the opposing argument that says we should drop meat and engage in whole-food, plant-based diets for the sake of our own health, for the animals and for the planet – which I still adhere to.

But then, when the end of the film came, we actually thought that we’d been duped. Unlike Forks Over Knives (FoK) or Cowspiracy – The Sustainability Secret (CS), documentary films that strongly argued for a whole-food, plant-based diet, Sacred Cow was thin on systematic evidence, preferring to tell anecdotal stories instead to support its case. One particular story I recall in Sacred Cow was the interview with a young woman who was convinced to go vegan as a teen and ended up later childless, essentially blaming the lack of meat and dairy in her diet. But as anyone knows, such stories are baseless unless they are supported by sound evidence. What is the fraction of childless women that are NOT vegan/vegetarian? It’s questions like this that urgently need an answer before any claims can be made either way.

Indeed, it was the much more systematic approach in FoK or CS with good quantitative evidence that convinced us to go vegetarian at age 70. We noticed the difference after barely a month: we felt lighter and well… just plain healthier. (Need I dwell on the constipation from meat that I suffered when growing up? Humans don’t have the proper stomachs for meat: our intestines are much too long, better suited for plant-food digestion.)

The 2011 film FoK was based on a rigorous book published in 2005 and led by the American medical researcher T. Colin Campbell at Cornell University, titled The China Study. The main thrust of this book, with lots of quantitative numbers and graphs, was that people in the various provinces of China (where their genes were not an issue, since they are all essentially from a very similar DNA bank) were systematically dying from particular diseases, depending on the animals they ate, which was the element that varied most from one province to another. This study, initiated by Chou En-lai, who himself was stricken with pancreatic cancer and wanted to improve the lot of his Chinese compatriots, made statistical analyses based on millions of cases and hence maintained a high degree of statistical rigour.

‘Indeed, it was the much more systematic approach in FoK or CS with good quantitative evidence that convinced us to go vegetarian at age 70. We noticed the difference after barely a month: we felt lighter and well… just plain healthier.’

Cowspiracy, produced in California by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn in 2014, presented lots of hard evidence that factory farming is bad but also that grazing for meat production, while much better from some points of view, would also not work for humanity since it would require the grazing area of most of the Earth’s landmass to make it viable.

Both FoK and CS argued convincingly to us that the only viable way was for humans, the clearly dominating large species on the planet, to turn to plant-based diets. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have grazing animals, but we don’t need so many and why do we need to slaughter them at all for our own enjoyment before they can live out their lives, as we do? Cows in India are treated this way.

All this when the world’s forests (key to mitigating against climate change) are felled to create fields to grow enough corn and soy to bring as efficient feed to the animals stuck in crowded factory farms often half-way across the planet. Humans consume about 8 billion animals yearly, which is clearly one of the leading causes of GHG-driven climate change, the biggest threat facing humanity today.

Growing plant-based food for direct human consumption is at least an order of magnitude more efficient than first passing it through the stomach of an animal, and at least as good if not better. And as to the question of whether humans are born herbivore, omnivore or carnivore, there can be little doubt:

waoy.org/26.html
rense.com

I hope Diana’s next study will be more rigorous than this one!

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