Thursday, January 14, 2016

Samsara Documentary Food Sequence Video Clip



The headline was certainly provocative:

Watching This Video Might Make You Decide To Stop Eating Meat And Become A Vegetarian

Touted as an "eye-opening clip from an incredible documentary film", the SAMSARA food sequence video claims to depict "the life-threatening situations of animals and the serious problem human [sic] faces when confronted with the danger of eating meat".

News flash - of course eating meat involves life-threatening situations for animals. Animals have to be killed before they can be eaten. Pork chops are not harvested from a pork chop tree.

This clip, taken from an hour and 42 minute documentary, contains scenes from a Chinese meat processing plant. Some posting this clip on line believe that viewing the video will lead people away from eating meat,which one poster describes as "meatatarian".

Before viewing the clip, I was expecting to see gruesome displays of abusive animal cruelty, but what we see, for the most part, are workers in an exceptionally clean and efficiently managed meat processing facility.

I saw nothing in the video which would convince me to abandon my omnivorous ways.

The person who posted the video clip on viralityvideos.com, wrote of seeing the health consequences of being a meat-lover in this "shocking" video. There are portions of the clip showing obese individuals scarfing down burgers, fries and soda. Having a diet made up exclusively of that dangerous trio is a path to obesity, but these individuals' health problems are more likely due to the grease and fat the fries and ground beef contain - as well as the high sugar content of the soda -  rather than eating meat, per se.

The documentary from which the clip is taken is called, by some, as a "search for the elusive current of interconnection that runs through our lives". Granted, there are many visually interesting scenes in the Samsara documentary, but I found the documentary to be, overall, a pointless and meaningless work. If you can find interconnectedness in watching a series of random, unrelated events, then the Samsar Documentary is right up your alley.

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