Niki Bezzant: Scare tactics not the best way to bring change

We don't have to be vegan to benefit from eating more plants. Photo / Babiche Martens

Opinion

By Nikki Bezzant

I love a good documentary.

Netflix and other streaming services have put an excellent selection of food-based documentaries at our disposal.

The Chef's Table series is inspiring and beautiful. Cooked is Michael Pollan's exploration of the history of cooking and what it means. Jiro Dreams of Sushi - one of my favourites - is a moving look at a chef who has dedicated his life to creating perfect, Michelin-starred sushi in a tiny Tokyo restaurant.

We're so lucky that there's now such a wide selection of fascinating films on food, eating and health.

Lately people have asked if I've seen What the Health, a recent Netflix addition.

The blurb says: "This film examines the link between diet and disease, and the billions of dollars at stake in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and food industries". Sounds great, I thought; right up my alley.

Unfortunately the film doesn't live up to the description. It is actually an agenda-based, unscientific polemic advocating for everyone in the world to be vegan.

It starts frustratingly by misinterpreting the World Health Organisation's warnings on processed meat and cance. For the record, eating ham and bacon is not great, but it's not as dangerous as smoking cigarettes.

It does a similar thing with eggs, bizarrely claiming that eating an egg a day is equivalent to smoking five cigarettes. Dairy gets the same treatment at the hands of various white-coated experts; cheese is described as "coagulated cow pus".

Meat is "dead, decaying flesh". It didn't take long to discover, on checking, that almost everyone interviewed here is passionately vegan, and some have written books or sell programmes on plant-based vegan living.

The film-maker, Kip Andersen, employs some frustrating techniques to make it appear that he's being stonewalled by health organisations such as the American Heart Association.

Phoning the call centre or asking the receptionist/security guard why they don't tell people that dairy is deadly does not seem like the best approach if you're really interested in getting answers.

It's true documentaries need a point of view. But the best documentaries at the very least attempt some sort of balance. This one paints - in very broad strokes - a picture of a massive global conspiracy by the dairy, egg, meat and pharmaceutical industries to make us all sick.

I think this is a shame, and a missed opportunity for a true promotion of the benefits of plant-based eating.

The film touches on some important points: the spectre of antibiotic resistance, the questionable environmental practices of pig farmers in the US, the lack of nutrition education for trainee doctors.

But there's so much more that could be said in a much more approachable way - especially when people are more open than ever to plant-based eating.

In my experience, scaring and disgusting people is not the best way to get them to change. We don't have to be vegan to benefit from eating more plants. It's something we can all do by adding to our diets, not taking away.

•Niki Bezzant is editor-at-large of Good Food Guide.