Few documentaries have the ability to make you question your fundamental morals and convictions. For me, Food Inc. was one of my favorite documentaries for this reason. There is, however, a new documentary on Netflix that does an equal or better job at doing this in my opinion. In Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, directors Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn are on a mission to expose the leading cause of environmental destruction, and in the process they reveal information about our food system that will have you asking yourself: “Can I really call myself an environmentalist and still eat meat?” The purpose of the film is to illustrate how there is one industry that out ranks any other in causing deforestation, climate change, species extinction, ocean dead zones, and water depletion, and how the top environmental organizations have focused their attention elsewhere when talking about how to mitigate these problems.

Throughout the documentary, Kip Anderson is on a quest to find out how to be more sustainable. He takes all the typical approaches of environmentalists, like recycling and taking shorter showers, but he is shocked when he finds out how many resources go into eating just one hamburger. He wonders why he was never aware of how intensive animal agriculture is in today’s world. It becomes clear that the top environmental organizations are not focusing on this issue when Kip does his research, so he becomes determined to find out why.

If you ask the average person what they think the single biggest contributor to environmental degradation is, they will probably tell you the fossil fuel industry. Shockingly, the leading environmental organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network, and Oceana (just to name a few) do not focus on animal agriculture as the number one cause of the destruction of the planet. The inability and unwillingness for these organizations to talk about the problems with animal agriculture was the most eye opening part of the documentary for me. You would expect for these organizations, who claim to be advocates for protecting our lands and oceans, to be speaking about the root cause of our most serious environmental harms.

What can you do if you truly want to make a positive difference for the planet? Recycling and taking shorter showers is not going to cut it, as you will see after you watch this documentary. The statistics given throughout this film are almost unbelievable. It is hard to comprehend why more people are not talking more about animal agriculture, but Kip explores the many possibilities for why this is the case. It is actually extremely difficult to justify eating meat at the rate we do today after watching Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. If you want to be a well-informed person on the most important environmental issues of our time, then you must see this documentary. It will have you questioning something that is so fundamental to life culture, and being human: food.

Here is a link to the official trailer: https://vimeo.com/95436726