As a kid growing up in Yorkshire, Thomas Pickering never ate animal products. This was simply the way he had been brought up.
The future filmmaker remembers as a seven-year-old wandering through a supermarket with his mum, looking at the meat shelves and knowing instantly that he didn’t like what he was seeing. “I said to my mum, ‘I don’t want to walk down this aisle anymore.’”
Pickering’s father had worked in a small zoo in Sewerby and had decided that if he was caring for animals during the day, he didn’t want to have them served up on his plate when he got home for dinner.
“It didn’t sit right with him,” Pickering recalls. The family made the immediate decision that they would renounce animal products. This was the 1980s, when very few restaurants offered vegetarian or vegan options.
The director’s new feature documentary I Could Never Go Vegan, released by Dartmouth Films in UK and Irish cinemas on April 19, explores just why so many people remain so distrustful of the vegan lifestyle. As he argues very persuasively, consuming animal products is bad for your health, bad for your sex life, bad for the planet – and the animals are still being treated by the food industry with unspeakable cruelty.
Thomas and his brother James have been working in film for several years.
“Obviously, I am a quite passionate vegan. I wondered if I could combine these two loves (filmmaking and veganism),” the 35-year-old director explains why he began work on the project. “I actually said to my brother one day that we thought we knew why we were raised the way we were, but that we had never specifically asked our parents [about it].”
Pickering was determined to make the documentary entertaining as well as informative and to consider seriously all the arguments against the vegan lifestyle that are routinely trotted out by critics. Again and again, people would tell him that they could “never go vegan.” He decided to call their bluff and ask why not.
“Little did we know it would take four years to make,” Pickering says of a film that ended up having a very lengthy gestation.
The documentary starts on an upbeat note as Pickering meets various athletes including powerlifting champion Sophia Ellis who’ve achieved extraordinary physical feats. There are also brisk interviews with experts, among them environmental activist George Monbiot and health professionals including Dr Shireen Kassam, Dr Gemma Newman and gastroenterologist Alan Desmond.
“We knew that we couldn’t start with the really hard hitting welfare and slaughterhouse stuff because people would just turn it off. They wouldn’t want to see it. I completely understand that. It’s not nice to watch. So we had to be quite tactical in how we were going to get to that point,” Pickering explains why the film begins with inspiring stories and with plenty of humour. The idea was to ‘draw people in” before touching on some of the more disturbing aspects regarding the slaughterhouses and battery farms. ‘It was trying to do it in a way that was entertaining and engaging before it got serious…we wanted to show that just because we’re vegan, it doesn’t mean we can’t have a joke as well.”
The filmmakers don’t make any assertions unless they have evidence and “hard-hitting” science to back up their claims.
The film has some illustrious patrons. Its executive producers include animal rights activist Heather Mills and Hollywood star Alicia Silverstone. They came aboard the project late on but are doing everything they can to raise awareness of the film.
I Could Never Go Vegan is full of talking heads but Pickering makes sure that interviewees give their opinions in a “succinct” and ”punchy” fashion. He didn’t want to “leave any time for the viewer to get bored or lose interest in any way.”
An original cut ran at a greater length. This was soon tightened up. Some notable figures, among them green energy mogul Dale Vince (who runs football team Forrest Green Rovers as a vegan football club) hit the cutting room floor.
I Could Never Go Vegan has its premiere April 10 in London with a ‘northern” premiere to follow in Sheffield on 11 April. Next week, the film will be in cinemas. Plenty of Q&As and vegan food tastings are being arranged.
“We are trying to make it an event so people come and experience it and hopefully make some changes [to their diet] on the back of it.”
Pickering has been encouraged by enthusiastic early reviews. He feels the vegan message is now cutting through with a broad public. Meat consumption is dropping in the UK (although for some reason it continues to rise in the US).
“If people are willing to open up and truly watch the welfare angle, the footage we capture when I go undercover on the farm and the slaughterhouse footage, it is very hard to “unsee” that,” the director reflects on the shocking, meat is murder-style material he has gathered together of distressed animals being killed in squalid circumstances. However, the director suspects that the film’s lighter-hearted moments may prove just as effective to converting doubters to a vegan diet. If they can live longer and have a better sex life, that might be enough to make them re-think their carnivorous habits.
The documentary is not intended as “a direct attack “ on meat-eaters but Pickering accepts that some people may regard it as a critique of their lifestyles. He takes some flak himself from an outspoken meat eating friend who keeps on ringing him up, telling him why he can never be a vegan.
“I hope once he sees the film he will be converted,” Pickering says.
The director is already at work on several new projects. One is on the “independent wrestling scene in the north of England.” Another is “a love letter to heavy metal, exploring what that genre is all about, how it is a little misunderstood and what it means to fans.”
And, yes, several heavy metal stars are vegans, among them lead vocalist of Swedish band Arch Enemy, Alissa White-Gluz, one of the exec producers of I Could Never Go Vegan.
“There’s a lot more [vegans] than you think,” he dismisses the idea that all heavy metal stars keep themselves nourished by biting off the heads of bats.
