To make a documentary about food is necessarily to be a little preachy. Vegucated doesn't manage to fully shake off this preachiness, but it does manage to make itself personal and even funny.
The filmmaker's approach is really what manages to pull this off. Instead of exclusively barraging the viewer with impersonal facts and statistics, the film shows three omnivorous New Yorkers living a vegan lifestyle over a period of weeks, as they come to learn what it means to be vegan and why people choose to not consume animal products. The viewer is brought along the journey of trying to be vegan, making the path to veganism seem like a real possibility instead of an idealistic endeavor that no one would seriously successfully try.
This film was one of the first I watched in an attempt to educate myself about my own food choices. Some of the questions it made me think about include:
1. Why do I make the food choices I do? What influences my food choices - culture, tradition, price, packaging, marketing, etc. - and what other things should be influencing my food choices?
2. Why do I continue to eat meat and other animal products if they aren't nutritionally necessary? What would a vegan life look and feel like? Would it be difficult to become a vegan (prices, willpower, socially, etc.) ?
3. Where do the animal products I consume come from? What information can I get about how they are produced and processed? How can I educate myself so that I can make informed decisions about eating animal products?
4. It seems like a lot of vegan products or meat substitutes are highly processed. How could a person strike a balance between eating less meat and eating less processed food?
5. Of the reasons to become veg/vegan, which would be most important to me? Environmentalism, animal welfare, personal health...?
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