Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed The Planet
In a topical and provocative Arrow Pictures documentary environmental campaigner, George Monbiot, looks at how food is driving us towards global disaster.
Nick Metcalfe
Executive Producer
Distributor
Fremantle
How food is driving us towards global disaster.
How food is driving us towards global disaster.
"This film is about revolutionary ideas that could do away with agriculture as we know it, but still feed ten billion people and bring the natural world back from the point of collapse, to create something extraordinary." George Monbiot
In a topical and provocative Arrow Pictures documentary environmental campaigner, George Monbiot, looks at how food is driving us towards global disaster.
We’re told the cure to climate breakdown is to stop flying, or using plastic bags, or to have smaller families. The biggest single problem is how we feed ourselves, particularly on meat. Animal grazing is a disaster: we cut down trees that suck in atmospheric carbon and replace them with animals responsible for generating vast quantities of greenhouse gases. And we’re blind to the problem: some of what we think are Britain’s most beautiful landscapes, such as the Lake District, are treeless ‘sheep-wrecked deserts’.
Grazing uses twice as much land as all the world’s crops but produces just 1% of our food. Free range farming may be kinder to the animals but does even more damage to the planet.
Monbiot believes there is room for optimism. He looks at alternative food sources, including synthetic meat, and a process that produces protein just from bacteria, and air. Freeing grazing land will allow re-wilding – with forests that will capture carbon. In a powerful sequence vegan Monbiot shows that he is prepared to make a painful personal sacrifice, by killing a deer, to allow trees to re-grow in the Scottish Highlands.
In a topical and provocative Arrow Pictures documentary environmental campaigner, George Monbiot, looks at how food is driving us towards global disaster.
Have you seen...
From epic long-running hit series to award winning feature documentaries, we bring each story to life like never before.
