Ep. 7 – “Eating Animals” film director Christopher Quinn on the hidden costs of factory farming

The award-winning screenwriter, film director and producer Christopher Quinn’s latest film, “Eating Animals,” explores the costs of cheap meat. “It’s not just about losing all these resources, but about losing ourselves,” he says. “Our sense of self. Our spirit.”

For 2.5 million years, humans sustained themselves by eating plants and animals that lived and reproduced without our manipulation. That changed 10,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens began to intervene in the lives of a few plant and animal species, sparking what we now call the Agricultural Revolution. The Industrial Revolution followed some 10,000 years later, in the early 1700s, revolutionizing our eating habits yet again. Just as the Humanist religions were defining human beings as the image of god, humans started to view animals as meat machines. Farmers brought the techniques of the factory system into the slaughterhouse, dramatically increasing the number of animals they could raise and kill for food. The industrialization of agriculture has led to the practice now known as “factory farming,” a multibillion dollar industry that controls nearly a third of Earth’s land, is transforming ocean ecosystems, and produces more greenhouse gas emissions than planes, ships, trucks, cars, and all other transport combined.

“The very idea that there are these large corporations that make it so farmers are contractually bound not to talk about farming to their neighbor — and if they do they can be sued by the corporation — is a fundamental breakdown of who we are,” says Quinn. (Photo courtesy of Christopher Quinn)

“For thousands of years, farmers took their cues from natural processes,” Jonathan Safran Foer writes in his book Eating Animals. “Factory farming considers nature an obstacle to be overcome.” Our guest, award-winning filmmaker Christopher Quinn, wanted to understand the forces behind this phenomenon. His new film, “Eating Animals,” based on Foer’s acclaimed nonfiction book, traces the environmental and economic consequences — on human and nonhuman animals — of the departure from local, sustainable farming. With bracing intelligence, empathy, and imagination, the film explores the practical and ethical costs of treating animals as meat machines and profiles some of the farmers who have refused to do so. In this interview, Quinn takes us behind the scenes of the film, shares his approach to storytelling and discusses why he believes the story of animal agriculture in America is important to tell.

Christopher Quinn via Twitter - filming with Gene Baur
Christopher Quinn on location filming a scene in “Eating Animals” with Gene Baur of Farm Sanctuary. “We have these moments now where we feel so disempowered in the process of these large systems that automate our lives and provide food for us in cost-effective ways,” Quinn says. “You change that view when you realize that what you put on your plate is an act of empowerment. Reducing the size of the meat or taking it off the plate is a powerful act.”  (Photo via Twitter)

Christopher Dillon Quinn is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer, and the founder of Big Star Pictures. His documentary “God Grew Tired of Us,” which chronicles the journey of three refugees from Sudan to the United States, won Best Documentary at the Deauville Film Festival and the Galway Film Festival. It earned him the emerging documentary filmmaker award from the International Documentary association and an Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. His acclaimed film “Eating Animals” was released in 2017.

“There is something to be said about coming in with mutual respect and admiration,” Quinn says of meeting the people he interviews on film. If you take that tact, I think it’s a much better approach to having a conversation. People’s lives unfold in front of you, and the stories they want to tell come out. I’m not there in any way to judge.” (Photo courtesy of Christopher Quinn)
The film features fourth-generation farmer Frank Reese. At his Good Shepherd Ranch in Lindsborg, Kansas, Reese maintains the oldest continuous strains of standard-bred heritage birds in North America. Unlike the vast majority of poultry birds in America, Reese’s birds breed on their own, are grown outdoors, and raise their own young. Both the heritage strains and the knowledge Reese has acquired through over 60 years of farming are at risk of extinction. (Photo courtesy of Christopher Quinn)
The producers of “Eating Animals:” Christopher Quinn, Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer.
“In the film, you see a cavalcade of angry farm managers who run the corporate farms yell [at the camera],”Quinn says. “I always had a great deal of empathy even for them because you can see the pain in their faces. They knew that there was something fundamentally wrong. They knew that this wasn’t right. They knew that if anybody else saw it, [they would know] it wasn’t right. And that feeling that something is wrong, in some ways, gives me a tremendous amount of hope.” (Photo courtesy of Christopher Quinn)

Recommendations:

“The Century of the Self” (BBC series) by Adam Curtis

Love in the Anthropocene by Dale Jamieson and Bonnie Nazdam

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

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