Can you look an animal in the eye and continue to eat meat? This tremendously weird documentary made the answer brazenly clear
Last night’s Channel 4 documentary Meat the Family operated on a simple enough premise: a meat-eating family must care for a farm animal for three weeks before deciding whether to kill it or not. And, for three quarters of its duration, it went exactly as you’d expect. But then, my god, the whole thing turned into a goddamn Michael Haneke movie.
We’ll get to that part soon. Timed cleverly to coincide with Veganuary, Meat the Family was essentially a reminder that ignorance is bliss. We were introduced to two families whose consumption of meat was both gleeful and excessive, then watched as they were forced to look after some of the animals they enjoyed devouring so much. One received a pair of pigs, the other three chickens. The question, ultimately, was this: can you look an animal in the eye and continue to eat meat?