Archive 2024

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DocTalk Our Everyday Meat

Europeans consume 100 kilograms of meat per year; if the same amount were consumed in China, we would need three planets. This idea is promoted by meat industry lobbyists and adopted by politicians who serve the interests of intensive farms, where unimaginable things are happening: animals atrocities animals, dramatic environmental pollution, loss of biodiversity, antibiotic resistance (a premise for the emergence of devastating pandemics), the destruction of communities, worker exploitation, and a complete disregard for human health.

Europeans consume 100 kilograms of meat per year; if the same amount were consumed in China, we would need three planets. This idea is promoted by meat industry lobbyists and adopted by politicians who serve the interests of intensive farms, where unimaginable things are happening: animals atrocities animals, dramatic environmental pollution, loss of biodiversity, antibiotic resistance (a premise for the emergence of devastating pandemics), the destruction of communities, worker exploitation, and a complete disregard for human health.


Food for profit. The film by journalists Giulia Innocenzi and Pablo D’Ambrosi is a journalistic investigation carried out over five years in several European countries, revealing the links between the meat industry, lobbying, and the corridors of power in Brussels. Rule number 1: productivity matters, the rest are details. The exposed realities are shocking. On the one hand, there are the intensive farms, where animals are mistreated, the environment is massively polluted, and hygiene standards are nonexistent.

On the other hand, there is the cynical lobbying and unscrupulous politicians who propose genetic experiments in Africa, where "people are starving to death and are happy if a hen lays 8 eggs instead of 6." Or parliamentarians ready to support fake amendments like the breeding of genetically modified animals with 6 legs to optimize profit per grown body, cows with two reproductive systems to increase milk production per head of cattle, etc. All massively subsidized with European money.

The debate seeks to reveal what we are truly eating when we order a steak, the connections between the political world and the meat industry, how consumer interests have ended up last in line, even though policies should be in favor of people and communities, and whether we can still do something before it's too late. And the haunting question: do we believe in democracy or in lobbyocracy?


*The talk will take place in romanian language with invited experts, filmmakers, moderator and streamed online.