INDISTINCT CHATTER AND LAUGHTER
Though we rarely think about it,
Britain is now raising the most peaceful and happy humans ever.
Violence has been defeated with compassion,
depression cured with intimacy,
but history has been replaced with silence.
INDISTINCT, MELLOW CONVERSATION
For many years,
our young people have been protected from the full horror of the past.
Some say a little too protected.
My gran said that back then, the soil was just, like, really dry,
so you couldn't really grow any vegetables.
Is that...? Is that right?
For these youngsters, the idea that human beings like them
were once complicit in a bloodbath of unnecessary suffering
is too absurd to imagine.
Why would anyone eat a baby?
It's just a little baby.
A little baby lamb.
Yet for my generation,
there remain painful memories of a time before empathy,
before we realised that we had to stop eating each other.
Dr Yasmine Vondenburgen is one of the most celebrated psychotherapists
in the world.
But now she's putting her reputation on the line
by discussing the one thing we'd all rather forget.
In her taboo-busting and deeply personal book
The Guilt Of Eating Your Brother,
Vondenburgen suggests that former carnists like her are under threat
from a new psychological sickness.
It's still difficult to say it out loud.
I ate animals.
I ate fish.
I drank the milk from cows.
From cows.
The people here are regulars
at one of Vondenburgen's weekly support groups.
This is one of the few places
where someone like retired wilderness planner David,
whose name and former occupation have been made up,
can discuss the shame of carnism.
I'm going to throw the beanbag
and when you catch it, say the name of a cheese you used to eat.
It's not easy for anyone to name a cheese
and it has taken months for the group to reach this point.
Camembert.
But by naming the cheeses in a safe space,
the shame can be lifted.
Parmesan.
Edam.
Yet for some, like Davina,
it's simply too soon.
Younger viewers may find these confessions monstrous,
but Dr Vondenburgen believes
it's now time for us to face what happened together.
It's very cruel for youngsters today to ask,
"Why did these people do what they did?"
We couldn't have known that
we were active participants in a slave trade,
because the language of the time
suggested we were just eating our dinner.
Inspired by Vondenburgen's transformative work,
this film aims to finally break the silence and the shame
around our animal-eating past.
- Try bacon. - It tastes delicious.
Bah!
Could you have done anything differently
at that point in your life?
Because if we don't, how can we even begin to forgive each other
or appreciate the debt we owe to the rebels who paved a path to freedom?
I suppose I still feel there's something a bit off
about anyone on this planet being cut up and put in a bap.
Say it to her.
I forgive you.
Yes.
This is the story of how people became compassionate.
What's that?
Mum, I'm really hungry.
And how meat became people.
Is there anything else you want to say to that little girl?
I love you.
Yes.
I love you!
Yes.
SHE SOBS
We have to break the silence around this now,
because there is a whole generation...
suffocated by shame.
CHILD LAUGHS
Who were we?
How could we?
Why did we?
HE COUGHS
To fully understand the horror of the past,
we must go back to 1944.
When we think of 1944,
we tend to think of the establishment
of the world's first vegan society.
But 1944 was also a time of human war and rationing.
All the time I have to be thinking about substitutes.
Substitutes for meat, for milk,
for eggs.
Yet vegetables were not rationed.
The Dig For Victory campaign encouraging self-sufficiency
completely changed how people ate...
- NEWSREEL: - Potatoes at yourservice whenever you want them
and cabbages fit for a king.
...and Britain became more healthily fed than ever before.
Isn't an hour in the garden better than an hour in the queue?
But just a decade later, with peace firmly established,
it was finally safe to begin slaughtering other animals again.
- NEWSREEL: - Meat, the last food on ration,
has been freed after 14 years.
And the end of rationing also meant the rise of the celebrity chef.
Would you please glance at your programme?
The audience could see, turning blissfully in front of the gas pit,
that most poetic of foods, a little sucking pig.
In 1956, Fanny Cradock filled the Royal Albert Hall
with her performance of cutting a dead pig in half
and putting it on a big plate.
He is well and truly tucked up.
Over she goes
and there we are.
Anyone who was still eating vegetables in the '50s
clearly couldn't afford to go to the theatre.
Over the following 20 years, Fanny would dedicate her life
to bringing the glamour of meat into every British home.
For instance, if we put you in the pot and cooked you
immediately after cutting your throat,
you'd eat like an old boot, but to a cannibal,
you'd be delicious after you'd been hung for 16-21 days.
And by the end of the 1970s, to be a successful British family,
men were expected to ride on tricycles wearing bowler hats
and if their wives couldn't stuff a turkey fast enough,
they'd lose this game show.
Now they've got to stuff the turkey.
But this lifestyle wasn't for everyone.
Some families had decided to live without consuming animals
and they called themselves "the vegans."
My name's Harold Bland and this is my wife Jenny.
But the early vegans were not as inspirational as Fanny Cradock.
We've been vegan now for ten years
and, of course, the baby is a life vegan.
We've found that our vegan diet keeps us perfectly healthy.
We can pursue all our outdoor activities that we used to
with just as much interest.
We go cycling, camping, canoeing, walking, all those sort of things.
Now, let's see what vegans eat.
In time, vegans would come to be regarded as trail-blazing heroes,
but for now, they were sat in a semicircle
around a table of brown food and fruit.
You will find clear recipes in our cookery book What's Cooking?
by Eva Batt.
Thank you, Erica.
If you would like recipes or more information
about other aspects of veganism...
Yet no-one did.
Throughout the '70s and '80s,
life became even harder for the vegan movement
when the animals people were consuming
stopped looking like they'd ever been animals.
Now, ain't that finger-lickin' good?
American food companies found new ways of disguising animal flesh
as toys children could eat.
♪ We like this rap, it really rocks
♪ But we'd rather jump in the barbecue sauce
♪ Cos we're chick-en-en-en
- ♪ You know the one, McDonald's - Food, folks and fun! ♪
Fingers, ahoy!
Children may not have eaten a dead fish staring up at them on a plate,
but they would definitely eat a finger recommended by a captain.
- ...all have new coats. - They taste great, mate.
♪ He's the marvellous Magical Burger King
♪ Now, watch me, kids When I twist my ring
- ♪ Like magic! - We're at Burger King! ♪
Parents were charmed by characters like the Burger King,
preferring to think of him as a magical king,
rather than someone just dressed like that
to detract from the genocide.
Burger King, yay!
OK, now, smile and say, "cheeseburgers!"
Cheeseburgers!
And Ronald McDonald's hair was red because he was a clown,
not because he couldn't stop swimming in blood.
Not till you learn to smile.
SINISTER MUSIC
The clown, the captain and the king,
all masterfully diverting the public's attention from this.
PIG SQUEALS
Just a decade later, the intensive farming that made meat
so cheap to produce was also leading to brand-new diseases.
Cows were going mad and humans worried
that they too would go mad if they ate them.
Children were now so central to the marketing of meat
that during the BSE crisis,
the UK agriculture minister persuaded people
that beef was safe to eat by feeding a burger
to his four-year-old daughter.
Look, I got all that medallion. It's all cheap.
And you're happy about... You're confident about eating it?
My dear boy, I'm 70,
so even if I incubate for ten years, I don't mind.
You know what I mean?
Meanwhile, even as animals were being slaughtered and eaten
on a scale never seen before,
the 1990s saw a wave of blockbuster films
in which children befriended animals and saved them from death.
- They eat pigs? - Pork.
So when an Oscar-winning film called Babe
told the story of a pig on a farm,
it was vital that the hero,
despite living on a farm and being a pig,
survived death because of his skills as a shepherd.
In 1995, taking your children to watch a likeable pig escape death...
BELL RINGS
- It's time for... - McDonald's Babe Happy Meal.
...followed by a celebratory Happy Meal...
...was completely acceptable.
Thanks very much.
In reality, animals were still being intensively farmed
and so the diseases kept on coming.
- REPORTER: - In the last three months,
1,607 cases have been reported in the UK.
And in 2001, ten million animals were exterminated
during the foot-and-mouth crisis, robbing them of months of life.
One pig survived because six years earlier,
he had starred in the reality TV show Pig At The Ritz.
It was one rule for the public and another for celebrities.
Despite all of this, in the new millennium,
the meat industry's total domination
over the hearts and minds of the British people...
I know quality beef when I see it.
...meant that few even considered that eating animal flesh
was anything less than essential for their health and happiness.
It's very hard to break an abuse cycle,
especially when you don't know you're being abused.
So the children reared on processed meat,
full of sugar, salt and fat to make it so delicious,
were suddenly suffering from new forms of cancer.
There were rapid increases in heart disease.
Scientists were discovering fascinating new types of diabetes
and obesity was an epidemic.
You'd hear ignorant vegans saying,
"Why is it they go back to that awful meat?"
By then, people ate meat
because they thought it was all they deserved.
All along, there had been a clear alternative.
THEY RAP:
But the vegans were still ridiculous
and rarely allowed on television.
This is what Jackie ate. Are you bloated?
Yes.
In 2004, one vegetarian, Gillian McKeith,
was finally permitted on television,
but only if she agreed to help overweight people by blaming them
for being too stupid to do the opposite
of everything the culture was telling them to do.
You eat like an unhealthy slob man.
Television's solution was to humiliate people
until they became thin.
I'm about to meet one of the fattest families I've met in my life.
This trundling trio are grazing their way to an early grave.
Watch out, massive fatties, the lard police are in town.
This era of shaming would last until the end of the decade,
until it was concluded that embarrassing people on TV
didn't make them healthier and Gillian McKeith fell over.
- Oh! - Oh! Best get Bob in.
Nobody is to blame.
We were all victims.
Most of my patients were children at the time.
You'd be fed meat at school,
- then more meat when you got home. - PIG SQUEALS
Then the next day, it would all start again.
Our parents just did to us what their parents had done to them.
- No shame. - No shame.
- No.
ALL: No shame!
No sha-a-a-a-ame!
Well done.
♪ Meat, me-me-me-me-me-me me-me-me-meat-meat... ♪
By the following decade, eating meat and dying early were so normal
that to win an election,
politicians had to set up special meat-eating events
to show they were normal guys
who weren't above developing heart disease.
And political leaders would simply be unelectable
if they were alleged to find something
we now deem to be grotesque quite tricky.
In 2015, the public was outraged when the UK Prime Minister
was accused of having sexual intercourse with a dead pig.
Somehow, placing one's penis in a pig
was considered much worse than killing one
and putting him or her in a sandwich.
And this meat-driven political culture
would reach its peak in 2017...
..when a brand of steak became the leader of the free world.
Nothing changed, even when a photograph emerged
of a slice of bacon with a nipple.
Will it ever be possible for the young people of 2067 to understand
how their parents and grandparents were able to swallow
a fellow animal's liquids and eat their body parts?
We asked some youngsters if they'd be prepared to go back in time.
I want to find out what happened.
Whenever I go and see my grandad, I...
can't stop thinking about him eating
and then I just have to leave the house.
Using the latest multisensory VR technology,
these volunteers have been transported back 50 years
to a popular high street chicken restaurant, which, in 2017,
was serving up half a million deceased chickens a week.
Bertie is a junior architect.
His grandmother once worked in this restaurant
before turning vegan and committing suicide.
How could anyone just eat a bird?
A bird.
HE SOBS
How could anyone eat a bird?
Television showed us how.
And now...
the star.
I love, respect and appreciate a chicken.
BONE CRACKS
That sound is the sound...
What looks to us now like a documentary about a lunatic
was in fact a hit show about cooking.
In you go, my darling.
HE VOMITS
SHE GROANS
- It's all been too much for Patricia. - Come on, let's go.
We agree to stop filming.
Back in the early second millennium,
British people were completely disconnected
from the animals going into their mouths...
HE GRUNTS
...and three men arose to enlighten a nation.
Fucking hell.
Middle-class people felt concerned that they could be eating
the same unhealthy, unethical food as poor people...
...so were delighted when the white man Gordon Ramsay
showed them how they could eat free-range animals.
- I'd like to talk to you a little bit about this whole name thing. - Uh-huh.
It's possible that you made a little bit of a mistake naming them.
Really?
Possible, because it's that much easier to form
a sentimental attachment to a creature if you give it a name.
Uh-huh. It's actually quite interesting
when you see how attached the kids have become.
You've got to start saying to them, "Which is looking the tastiest?"
Next, Gordon tried rearing his own sheep.
He insisted they be kept in lovely conditions that made them happy.
They're going to be really, really looked after here.
They're going to have a lovely time. They're going to be happy.
- I'm glad to hear it. - They come at my voice.
I do think that happy meat tastes better.
- Definitely. - Absolutely.
Yet most people watching Gordon Ramsay didn't have the time
or space to rear their own sheep, so continued to eat sad sheep and die.
What's your favourite food in the world?
McDonald's or Kentucky.
Burger King.
Fortunately, man of the people
and spokesperson for the Jamie Oliver Company, Jamie Oliver,
launched his own campaign against cheap school meats.
While we continue to serve this kind of food,
we're not helping the situation at all.
Kids and schooling and making sure that they're healthy
when they leave, for crying out loud,
is a basic necessity and right to every parent,
whether the parents are thick as shit or not.
As we all know, there's a lot of thick parents out there.
He successfully replaced the mashed up flesh in school dinners
with healthier, non-mashed up flesh.
Jamie did everything he could for humans,
apart from promoting the one diet
that wouldn't have just made them healthier,
but saved the lives of billions of their fellow animals
and reduced climate change.
HE GRUNTS
This is so good.
If only he'd listened to himself while skiing.
Mindful vegan vegetarian diets are looking really good at the moment.
The future is about a plant-based diet.
And not to be left out, super-chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
became profoundly concerned about cod
being fished to the point of extinction.
Here on this beach today, we start a campaign.
How many of you are going to get behind that campaign?
CHEERING
Hugh convinced Britain
to stop eating cod and start eating mackerel.
So Tim's mission is to get us all eating a bit less cod
and looking further down the food chain
- for alternatives. - Afternoon, sir.
Shortly after, mackerel became overfished and so also died.
I've been banging on about people eating more mackerel
for a lot recently.
From where we stand now,
it seems obvious that to promote the preservation of fish,
Hugh could have told people to stop eating fish,
but instead he wrote a book about how to cook fish.
The public were overwhelmed with the changes that weren't happening.
...and then I tried rearing my own sheep and it ran away.
- TEARFULLY: - I bought a sheep.
I miss him!
The television chefs continued to inspire humans
to improve their lives.
Hundreds of thousands of you joined my rubbish revolution.
But it was left to the art world to consider the lives of other animals.
Performance artist Jacqueline Traide conveyed the cruelty
of cosmetics testing by having the procedures done to herself.
SHE SCREAMS
She was tortured for ten hours in the Oxford Street branch of Lush.
SCREAMING CONTINUES
And Melati Suryodarmo danced on butter,
sending a clear message to the dairy industry.
RHYTHMIC DRUMMING
Meanwhile, in New York, Marina Abramovic spent 11 weeks at the MoMA
sat opposite people who ate meat and judged them in her head.
You put a whole chicken's breast in your mouth?!
Would you like me to eat your mother's tit?'
APPLAUSE
But like a lot of performance art, it was doomed to be incomprehensible
and these fringe artworks only confirmed vegans
as being attention-seeking loons.
By now, the public had grown tired of artists telling them
that meat was murder.
Otherwise popular musicians had been doing it for years,
so Paul McCartney launched the more upbeat Meat Free Monday...
Meat Free Monday.
♪ Well, Meat Free Monday
♪ It's a fun day... ♪
...which, of course, to us now sounds almost as offensive
as Ethnic Cleansing-Free Tuesday.
Ow!
Fortunately, a whole new generation of celebrity vegans
was emerging out of Hollywood.
Up until this point, vegans could only make people feel uncomfortable,
but now they would make them feel aroused.
It was even safe to talk about veganism,
as long as people wanted to have sex with you anyway.
- When did this happen to you? - There's one vegan in the audience!
CHEERING
The vegans had come a long way.
Harry Bonnie, you are an ex-boxer, a parachute jumper
and still, at 50 something, an athlete.
I've been a vegan for more than 14 years
and I can honestly say I have never felt fitter or more relaxed.
I stopped drinking milk when I learned of the cruelty
inflicted on cows and their calves.
Let's face it, Erica, cow's milk is for calves, not for humans.
Yes.
Back in 2015, it was the grime vegans who were most successful
at spreading the new message.
- RAPS: - ♪ I'm in Nando's with a veggie wrap
♪ Or I'm sitting in Leon munching a gobi
♪ Whichever one is nearer
♪ V-gang Now I see clearer
♪ No meat, no cheese, no milk, no eggs
♪ Don't believe me, ask Sarah... ♪
This is me and it's just another step of realness.
It's another thing you've got to peel back and throw away
and be you, that's who you are. I am a vegan person.
♪ ...Big up the man that know The girls that know
♪ Teachers that know Parents and children that know
♪ If you don't know Boy better know... ♪
Suddenly, the young people had hip vegans to emulate.
Going vegan was up 300% in teenagers,
online communication began to burst
the meat industry's propaganda bubble,
and in 2015, a 13-year-old Troye King Jones was listening to
JME in his bedroom.
I just loved grime, to be honest.
I was really into JME and he was a vegan.
And he said he stopped eating meat and dairy overnight,
so I was like, "Oh, I'll do that!" So I just stopped.
Just five years later, Troye would self-publish Blood On Our Forks.
I wrote that book when I was a child.
I was very angry for most of my teenage years.
A lot of it was just being anxious about
not having any hair under my arms.
Troye King Jones, such an important figure
for people in the vegan community.
Tonight, we meet activist, film-maker and major vegan Troye King Jones.
But first, is it time to buy a boat?
Troye spent the early part of his career with PETA,
the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
A time he found to be less than satisfying.
No! Please!
Actually, I was only with PETA for a short while.
I just remember pretending to die a lot and being ignored.
CHICKEN CLUCKS
Troye created films that he hoped would circulate online,
exposing horrors like the egg industry's systematic
shredding or gassing of male chicks.
I don't make videos like that any more.
I was advised to make some lighter versions.
However, Troye did have a minor breakthrough
with his viral short film A Day Out At Daddy's Egg Farm.
Oh, they are so cute! Can I have one, Daddy?
- No, we can't keep any of them. - Why, Daddy?!
Because they are male and we're an egg farm, remember?
So the chickens who are boys go to a chicken farm?
- No. - Huh?
What's that?!
Oh, that is where the chicks go.
Is it a castle?
- Yes. - OK, then.
Bye, Daddy, bye, little chickies. Love you. Bye.
Oh, Daddy, I forgot...
- HE SCREAMS - Timmy!
Oh, God! Oh, God!
I even made a feature film.
But who wants to sit and watch an entire film about veganism?
At the same time as Troye was developing his voice,
young academic Maude Polikoff was just 23
when she began connecting the routine sexual exploitation of cows
with her general critique of capitalism and hierarchy -
the foundation of what we now call fifth-wave feminism.
Baby, yes!
Mm!
The marketing of yoghurt was so sexualised it was bizarre.
I mean, it was the curdled milk of raped cows.
Mm!
Oh!
The obscenity of forcing cows to lactate against their will
and then making it sexy...
Mm!
So creamy it's sheer bliss!
Polikoff developed her thesis during her early dance career,
when she became frustrated with the number of times
she was asked to pour cow's milk over her breasts in music videos.
♪ I got that MILF money. ♪
I refused to have cow's milk poured on me.
♪ My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
♪ And they're like It's better than yours... ♪
Sometimes they'd melt cheese on our bottoms.
That was it for me. I went back into education.
What about social justice?
What Polikoff and other new vegan thinkers realised
was that exposing the meat and dairy industries was not enough.
The whole structure of British society had to be challenged.
Britain at that time was a very strange place to be.
There was still a monarchy.
We were living in this very deep-rooted hierarchy.
So, the Queen, despite being just another animal,
was above all British people.
So I suppose we thought that we should be above something.
The system was so obscenely patriarchal
that the Queen wasn't even seen as a woman.
The Queen lactated, though.
Nobody could accept it, but milk came out of her bosoms.
Fact.
The Queen, like many British people, loved certain animals
and rarely ate them, if ever.
The problem has always been that people think of animals
as being there for them
and how do you change that perspective?
If you look into a cow's eyes,
you can see there is a person in there.
But who has the time to get so busy with a cow?
But if animals weren't going to be eaten,
they would have to be entertaining.
Many British people liked nothing more than dressing up cats
and dogs as superheroes and pirates.
Or entering them into jumping competitions.
It seemed people were far more interested in watching cats
licking bananas than cows being shot in the head.
Of course, to a child of 2067,
these distinctions make little sense.
Do you think this was a pet or food?
Pet.
No, it was food.
CHILD SOBS
Back in the early 2000s, Britain was a loony bin.
I do feel very bad, actually, about animals.
But at the end of the day, it's going to happen,
do you know what I mean?
There's too many animals on this planet.
There's more animals than what there is human beings.
So you'll have to kill them at some point, you know what I mean?
When the day they change, saying,
"Oh, we're going to stop killing all animals,"
is the day I completely give up on life.
And perhaps the country would have stayed this way
if it hadn't been for climate change.
Several of Wednesday's events are focusing on
the climate impacts of meat and dairy consumption.
The UN had announced that veganism was now essential
to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.
Should we be eating less meat to save the planet?
When I say "we", I mean you and me, your mum, your grandma,
your niece, your nephew.
Should YOU be eating less meat to save the planet?
China committed to cutting meat consumption by 50%.
But it was much easier to affect change in an authoritarian regime.
The problem was Britain was a democracy
and most people couldn't even think about climate change,
because it meant the definite end of humanity.
That ain't happening.
What's some ice melting in the South Pole
got to do with me eating a cheeseburger in Croydon?
For the isles of Britain,
climate change meant endless and fatal flooding.
How would the nation respond?
Hello, and welcome to The One Show with Matt Baker...
And Alex Jones.
Now, we want to celebrate all of those flood heroes out there,
so do send in a picture - if you've got power, of course.
And it was during this flooding crisis that
a likeable victim emerged.
No-one cares about us, no-one cares that this is how we are living.
This is the third time this has happened.
No-one is listening to me. No-one is listening.
My kids are upstairs and they're soaking wet
and they're freezing and they're frightened.
I don't know what to do. How can this be happening?
You haven't half caused a bit of a stir.
Lindsay Graber was a powerhouse.
The farming of meat was one of the key causes of climate change.
Lindsay Graber tried to tell people before it was too late.
To eat one burger has the same footprint as
a month's worth of daily showers.
A MONTH'S worth of daily showers.
But while everyone enjoyed the spectacle of
a working-class mother with a wet house,
no-one could hear anything she said.
We're going to drown if we don't, so it's...
Meat production produces up to 15% of greenhouse gases.
They wouldn't even listen to the film star and politician Arnie.
Less meat, less heat.
So he walked off this cliff.
SCREAMING, THUD
The climate continued to change and animals continued to suffer.
The gulf between vegans and ordinary meat-eating people
now seemed unbridgeable.
One event illustrated this more than any other.
In 2019, Scottish performance artist Douglas Wolfe attempted to question
the dairy industry by living in a cage for six months
on Hemel Hempstead high street with tubes attached to his nipples.
Polikoff felt so connected to this piece of art, she bought it
and Douglas arranged to be raped every three months
in her back garden before finally winning the Turner Prize.
If you try to explain the dairy industry to young people today,
they'd be traumatised.
Like all female mammals,
cows obviously only produce milk when they have a newborn to feed.
So men would forcibly insert semen into each cow's vagina with a rod,
usually whilst she was trapped in
what was informally called a rape rack.
This was all totally legal. That was organic.
For a man to fist a cow.
Then the cow was pregnant for nine months
and she is, of course, very excited to see her child,
but that child is then taken away forever.
And a cow's bond with her young is incredibly strong,
so she will cry for days.
COW MOOS
Why is a cow suffering?
A cow is being humanely milked.
If you don't milk a cow, it will die anyway.
So, how would you...?
- If you don't milk a cow, they die? - Yes.
Because they have to be milked to get the milk out of their system.
Now, of course, if a cow had a baby and you decided to drink its milk...
you'd be put in a rehab centre for perverts.
The British had no interest in the feelings of cows,
but then, just months later, one fashion designer took the bold step
of putting a cow on the catwalk.
Four-legged models. Fashion!
For 30 seconds, it was all anyone could talk about.
Nothing to say about it.
Is it good for fashion, to have a cow on the catwalk?
Yes!
I'd love to see a cow wearing Molly Goddard.
It's all about interpretation of what the designer is looking for.
Cool beans!
Four-legged models!
It was never an aim to get a cow on a catwalk.
The public were now desperate to get the vegan look.
Obviously, most people, normal people on the school run,
they don't have time to be vegan, but do you know what?
The great thing about hemp is it's good for the planet
and it hides all your lumps and bumps.
And I think it looks fantastic.
Anybody could wear that. It looks great.
Just because it's vegan doesn't mean it has to be expensive.
You know, a lot of this stuff is still made in China.
It's fabulous.
- Yeah! - Really good.
Oh, and, Lauren, can we checkout what's in the tote bag?
- It's a falafel wrap! - Oh! Fabulous.
That's really good.
But incredibly, nothing the fashion world did helped
and Britain paid the price.
The World Health Organization says the virus seems to be
spreading beyond control in the community.
The super swine flu of 2021 pushed the NHS to breaking point.
Influenza pandemic
must be taken seriously...
Uniquely, pigs were able to carry
bird, human and swine influenza strains,
combining them into a super flu fatal to all three species.
You will wake this morning in the capital, lovely listener,
to the news that 876 people
so far in London have died
of what is being dubbed super swine flu.
And maybe you're wondering, as I certainly am today,
what else do you have in your kitchen
that might kill you?
Tens of thousands of humans died in the super swine flu
and many of those who survived were left without gums.
I mean, it's very difficult to talk about, obviously,
as the situation gets worse and worse here in London.
What is the story with you there?
- I... - HE SIGHS
I lost my friend Janet to the super swine flu.
I'm very, very sorry to hear it. How old was Janet?
She was only 37.
I mean, you must be devastated,
as her family must indeed be and all her friends.
She was such a.... You know, she never did anything to anyone.
You know?
- 'She played the clarinet.' - Aw...
Intensive farming was much more dangerous
than the public had been led to believe
and while BSE had been played out on linear TV
featuring a politician putting a burger in his daughter's mouth,
social media meant the sharing of science online.
Pork now felt dangerous, unclean, dirty
and many british people started reading the Torah and the Koran
for other cooking tips.
They'll be making the announcement almost immediately...
The animal farming industry was in tatters,
yet despite everything, a public majority still craved their meats.
The farms were saved, but to avoid another epidemic,
new strict animal welfare laws were put in place.
It was the end of intensive farming.
Many animals saw sun for the first time in their lives.
Sadly, the chickens people had been eating were so genetically modified,
it was very difficult for them to celebrate the news.
Now, as the price of meat increased,
if people weren't too scared too eat animals, they were often too poor.
No-one knew what to eat.
The British people were left confused and helpless.
Many looked to singer Beyonce for guidance.
Some gave up eating altogether.
SHE SIGHS
And so began what we now refer to as the era of confusion.
People wanted to stop climate change and improve their health.
They didn't want to be responsible for the suffering of other animals,
but how could they not?
You could give up eating anything that came from another animal,
but what if before you became a vegan you had legally bought a cat
who refused to eat anything other than fish?
Now you were killing 50 fish a month to keep one cat alive.
A cat which, now you've thought about it,
you should have never bought in the first place,
because what rights does one animal have to own another?
Many people felt it was best to let their pets starve and die.
And sick with anxiety, some people found themselves
in what became known as guilt meat loops.
This footage shows a Cornish woman who ate so many lamb koftas,
she had a stroke and woke up only able to speak Dutch.
SHE SPEAKS DUTCH
Debbie moved to Rotterdam and married a florist.
The era of confusion lasted another two years.
Until the first popular vegan chef, Freddy Jayashankar,
showed people how to use ingredients that had never had an inner life.
Today, I'm making one of my favourites. I love it.
It's delicious, it's easy and it's really affordable.
It's peshwari naan.
Freddy is probably the most significant person
in this revolution.
My mum often says to me, "Just add turmeric."
His plant-based Eastern cuisine seemed totally radical,
despite having been around for 2,500 years.
Well, then we knew what to do.
When you can see how long you are supposed to boil okra,
then you boil okra.
Knock, knock. Who's there? Peshwari naan.
- POLIKOFF: - Freddy was radically captivating.
Food is you, food is me.
Food is a parsnip.
Wow.
The last time I had this cake, it was so good I had to sit down.
He is just an incredible, free person.
And so intense, but in a really manageable way.
He was beautiful, but he was also pure.
He was like a monk.
He was like a monk you could fuck.
I wish I had two mouths.
Yeah, do you want to talk about Freddy's work,
or our relationship?
Through meditation, Freddy taught Troye to let go
of the anger of his youth.
Do you want to be eating a slave? Or could you try an aubergine?
Up to that point, Troye had believed in change by any means necessary.
You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs,
that sort of thing.
It was Freddy who told him, you know,
you don't have to make an omelette.
Everything changed once I started coming from
a place of genuine love rather than fury.
And I was able to reach out to people
I couldn't have even looked at before.
That was all Freddy.
Inspired by his partner's ability to reach out and love meat-eaters,
Troye bravely attended a food fair where he hugged the sellers of meat.
THEY CHUCKLE
Thank you. Thanks, mate.
Thank you.
Troye King Jones, I think he saw
that we weren't what we did.
Were you...? Did your... upbringing as a vegan, or...
No, no.
- ...did you choose to be a vegan? - Yeah, I chose to be a vegan.
I think I just got really upset by, like, the...
Like, a lot... I felt like it was...
- just a lot of death, really. - OK.
Like, a lot of death. So much death.
And while the road to compassion was not easy,
even for Troye King Jones...
This is a horrible place.
I can't... I can't look at another sausage.
...his vulnerability and empathy inspired a generation of activists.
I'm going to shock people with love.
We are going to shock people with compassion.
Mobilised vegans began to lay flowers outside butcher's shops
in mourning for those they had never even met.
People thought human rights were the priority,
but he knew no one of us can be free...
until every one of us is free.
And supermarket shoppers began to find it difficult
to make meat and dairy purchases
as the aisles were now filled with vegans
peacefully dancing without clothes.
♪ That's right
♪ Ooh-ooh-ooh...
Many meat-eaters were so aroused by their message, they joined in.
Others started getting their shopping delivered.
Unconditional love was giving people the capacity to change.
♪ OK, baby... ♪
And, in the same year, an award-winning intense BBC drama
starring Martin Freeman and Eileen Atkins
showed what life would be like for a woman with Alzheimer's disease
who had forgotten that it was normal to eat a chicken.
What's that?
What did you do?
Mum, please.
Where's the rest of her? Who did this?
Nobody did anything.
Did you...
...kill her?
- Mum, I didn't kill it. - "It"?!
She had a mother and a father, Jeff.
It's free-range.
What does that mean?
It means it's free-range.
It was a happy chicken running around a massive field
with all the other happy chickens.
- It had a good life. - Why do you keep saying "it"?!
I haven't seen any fields with birds wandering around.
Where are they, Jeff? Where?
Mum, I'm really hungry.
Well, have a cracker.
This unintentional vegan message in a mainstream drama
was quickly appropriated by Troye's movement.
And soon, everyone was saying "have a cracker".
Have a cracker.
Then, in 2024, a controversial hit musical,
broadcast in full by the BBC,
threatened to blow the dairy industry apart.
♪ Pregnant for nine months
♪ Hours of labour
♪ So excited to see my little boy
♪ Where
♪ Where have you taken my baby?
♪ Moo-oo
♪ He needs his mother too... ♪
That musical said everything,
but with this beautiful, haunting music.
♪ You must see the pain in my eyes
♪ Tell me he's still alive
♪ Stop making me pregnant
♪ Why molest me for milk
♪ That you don't need?
♪ Stop making me pregnant
♪ Why strap tubes to my breasts where my baby should be? ♪
For the first week, I think, all we did was moo.
♪ I'm not a machine
♪ I'm a mother
♪ And my nipples, they bleed
♪ It's my blood in your milk
♪ And there's puss in your milk
♪ Cos it's not your milk
♪ It's my baby's milk
♪ What kind of animal rapes just for milk? ♪
What kind of animal rapes just for milk?
♪ Let me die
♪ Just let me die
♪ Please let me die
♪ Let me die... ♪
People came out of the theatre and felt they had to buy rice milk.
♪ Let me die
♪ Please let me die
♪ Let me... ♪
During rehearsals, my own nipples did start to bleed.
My breasts really swelled up.
And I can't account for that.
The BBC were accused of having a clear left-wing, vegan bias.
A feeling not helped by an episode of Countryfile
co-presented by a duck.
♪ Vegan... ♪
But nobody could complain to the BBC
when Albania won the Eurovision Song Contest with this.
♪ Vegan. ♪
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
A vegan song winning in such a vegan-phobic continent,
this was the breakthrough for tolerance
many thought would never come.
Sensing the tide was turning fast,
this man began his campaign
to put meat back in the centre of British plates.
The fact is we are being oppressed by vegan lunacy, OK?
This is England, we are not lentils.
The roving vlogger and radio host Graham Watkins
became a champion of marginalised men with unexpressed emotions.
A lot of people felt left behind.
And they needed a strong father figure to reassure them
that they still mattered.
What's happened to our country? Who's taken the chicken nuggets?
Hey, excuse me. Are you a vegan?
- Yeah, I am, actually. - Yeah?
So you won't eat chicken?
No.
Why?
What's wrong with you?
Are you too lazy to chew?
When you don't have a very strong sense of yourself as an individual,
you tend to cling on to the familiar,
to the banal, even.
Oh, my God. Look how depressing this is.
Guess what? The first thing I see - a lentil.
Is that...? Is that a cake?
I mean, or is it a joke?
Hm?
What is that? That's some kind of excrement...
- It's cacao. - Do you think, for you,
this is about trying to have some sort of personality?
Do you eat this food because you think your face
doesn't look smug enough?
"If I wasn't a vegan, the whole world would implode."
Wouldn't you prefer a life containing joy?
And meat industry chiefs were now more desperate than ever
to persuade children that meat was cool and fun.
Quick, grab a sausage.
Welcome to Mike's Meat House.
CHEERING
Hold Mike's kebab.
WHIRRING
Double points if you beat the vegan.
Get her in the face.
Jump in the milk bath.
Press the button, press the button, press the button.
BELL RINGS
Mike's Meat House was sponsored by Birds Eye
and cancelled after four episodes.
As the battle for popular opinion hung in the balance,
no-one could convince the planet
that the UK should stop being flooded with water.
So, what's going on and can it be stopped?
Joining us now is the government's...
Thankfully, a familiar face from the past, climatarian,
former victim and now government flood tsar Lindsay Graber
told Britain what had to be done.
OK, beef requires 28-times more land than pork or chicken to produce.
It is the single biggest driver of global deforestation.
Compared to vegetables alone, it requires 160-times more land
and produces 11-times more greenhouse gasses.
It's time to stop the production of beef.
Ban beef?! Who is this wanker?!
OK, Lindsay Graber, thank you very much indeed for joining us.
Unfortunately, the sudden possibility of
a lack of choice caused many to turn against the much-loved Graber.
Er, I loved her when her house got wet,
but now she's acting like she's some sort of scientist.
Beef is our whole British identity.
They already shot the king.
Major change was coming,
but the journey to banning beef or any meats would be long and bloody.
We've got to get angry, people. They're not listening to us.
Tofu, polenta. Lentil, tofu, bullshit.
Animals - must we really stop eating them now
or can I have one last burger?
But veganism is just extreme.
It's narrow-minded, it's judgmental, it's self-satisfying.
What's extreme?
Look if you and I were in a field drinking beetroot juice
and somebody walked in and started sucking on the breasts of a cow,
who's the maniac?
It isn't just the human animal that has an interest in his life,
it isn't just a human animal who feels
a deep connection to his mother,
it isn't just a human animal who would rather be loved than be alone,
rather be free than be enslaved, rather live than be killed.
But vegans are still going to have to convince an awful lot of people.
You have to stop diminishing us, OK? We are not vegans.
You are vegans.
No, we're not. We're all animals.
That's why the idea of a meat industry is so appalling.
Look at what the meat industry is doing to our planet.
Look at what it's doing to other animals.
Look at what it's doing to us. That's extreme. We are not vegans.
They are carnists.
Why don't people like vegans?
That was when we stopped being vegans.
We didn't have to be vegans any more, because they were carnists.
He did that.
This was Troye's last interview.
We are receiving breaking news that the activist Troye King Jones
has been killed in his home...
I don't know how much I can talk about this.
Let's see how we go.
Police have arrested Gavin Knowles, an electrician in his 40s.
Although not confirmed yet, some reports are suggesting
he may have been a member of the Great British Meat League.
This man broke into Troye's flat and stabbed him to death...
...and then ate him.
He ate him.
And Gavin Knowles, the electrician, what do we know about him?
There are no monsters. He wasn't well.
If he had been loved, maybe he wouldn't have been so hungry.
Freddy and I both disappeared for a while.
Hi.
I just want him back.
He achieved a great deal in death.
People who had never even heard of Troye King Jones
spent the whole day watching this charismatic man on the news.
And we couldn't even bury him, because he'd been eaten.
After that, very few people wanted to be seen as a carnist.
Having a lamb chop suddenly felt like biting the Dalai Lama.
There was no doubt that the battle for popular opinion had been won,
as we can now see from this long-running TV soap.
Uh... eggs and bacon sarnie, please.
DOOF-DOOFS SOUND
Ironically, the big international corporations,
who had been at the forefront of the cheap meat boom,
rebranded with ease.
But change was less easy for British butchers and farmers,
who began to feel their identity and purpose being stripped away.
The growing feeling is that butchery is as bad as it sounds.
You are butchering dead bodies.
- I'm a butcher. - Yes.
And yet, despite 75% of the British public
now being at least vegetarian,
there was still a reluctance
to make the killing of other animals illegal.
Five years later,
the empathy that Troye had inspired was still being fiercely contested.
How do you know that animals are feeling anything?
Has anyone ever asked them?
Have you ever seen a fish cry? Do you know a pig with depression?
Kevin says that plants can feel pain too.
Is that right, Kevin?
I have read on the internet that if you put
a microphone close enough to a carrot, you will hear it screaming.
Well, thank you very much, Kevin.
But arguments like these completely fell apart
with a scientific breakthrough so profound,
many refused to believe it was even possible.
Dr Charles Grandage invented a machine
that could read the general thoughts and feelings of other animals.
Lucy the sheep was the catalyst for change nobody saw coming.
The voice we hear may sound familiar to older viewers.
It is, in fact, the voice of the classical actor Joanna Lumley,
who recorded every word in the English language
before she died with enormous charm.
- STILTED: - Why do you keep shaving me? I'm cold.
It was at this moment that everyone could see and hear
that other animals like them had feelings.
As the technology improved, all animals were fitted
with internal thought translation devices.
- STILTED: - I'm not a cheese factory. I am a goat.
- STILTED: - Why do you keep putting your fist inside my bum?
- STILTED: - Why are you still trying to make me ejaculate?
It was now clear that being vegetarian was simply not enough.
Humans could no longer ignore
what the other animals were saying to them,
specifically about the ongoing theft of their liquids
and potential children.
I think people did know that an egg was a chicken's period,
but why not have a period for breakfast?
I don't think that people knew that wild hens
only had 10-15 periods a year.
Imagine being forced to have 20-times more periods
than you were supposed to and then being killed for lack of periods.
It was beyond sexist.
By the '30s, the younger vegan generation had grown up
and were raising their own vegans.
Yet animal equality had still not been achieved.
Look, I've spoken to several chickens
and they really don't mind if we take their eggs.
- That's complete nonsense. - How many chickens have you spoken to?
I speak to them every single morning.
Whoa, whoa! We have to eat eggs,
or what would I have for breakfast with my wife?
There were no reproductive rights for chickens.
Ordinary working people have a right to drink milk.
It's not for government to intervene.
- Peter, would you molest a cow? - Oh, come on. - Why not?
You're drinking their milk without their consent,
you steal and kill their offspring in the process.
- Why not rape her?
- Look, I don't personally eat cheese, but we have to allow others,
if it's part of their culture, part of their heritage...
You can buy nut cheese.
What on earth is nut cheese?
It's cheese made with nuts.
This is absurd.
What will cows do if we farm cheese out to nuts?
The debate was raging
and a new bill in the House of Commons was on the table.
If I were to eat a nut, I would die.
Empathy, climate change and the improvements in nut cheese
could no longer be ignored.
The British government finally passed the hugely popular
2035 bill of animal rights,
which criminalised the enslavement, breeding and killing of all animals.
MOOING
As well as the manipulation or consumption
of anything coming out of one.
SHEEP BLEATING
The survivors of meat agriculture were sent to recovery centres,
where they were free to live out the rest of their lives
and care for their children without fear of them being taken away.
For humans who still needed to feel like they were killing something,
old VR technology made it possible.
HE IMITATES GUNFIRE
And for those who really couldn't let go,
human women began selling their milk on the street.
I don't know what you want me to say.
But for some, the fight had just been too much.
This is Simba.
Simba, do you want to be a burger or a sausage?
Oh, sausage. OK, then.
SIMBA WHIMPERS
32 years later, and the now famous Clifton Abattoir of Cumbria
is amongst the least popular museums in the UK.
Each cow would be led into a stunning pen or a restraining box.
A pneumatic pistol would be used to stun the cow...
kill the cow,
ideally before he or she recovered consciousness.
Are there any questions?
How many lost their lives?
No accurate records were kept.
It wasn't deemed important.
EMOTIVE MUSIC
This is thought to be the last milk chocolate Easter egg
made in Britain -
a chilling artefact of a culture that once stole a cow's milk
and moulded it into the shape of a chicken's egg.
And for those still struggling to process
their animal-eating past,
Dr Yasmine Vondenburgen's methods can be life-saving.
- INAUDIBLE SPEECH - ♪ Take my mind and take my pain
♪ Like an empty bottle takes the rain
♪ And heal, heal
♪ Heal, heal... ♪
I'm sorry. I know, I know, of course.
Of course you ate pigs.
Of course you did.
♪ ...Take my past and take my sins... ♪
It took a long time for the humans of Britain
to truly love their fellow animals.
And now perhaps we can show that same love to our fellow humans.
We are all animals and all animals can make mistakes.
♪ ...Heal, heal... ♪
I'm sorry.
Sorry.
♪ ...And tell me some things last... ♪
Salmon.
Yes.
Cod.
Thank you.
Haddock.
Mm.
♪ Vegan
♪ Vegan. ♪
♪ Pregnant for nine months
♪ Hours of labour
♪ So excited to see my little boy
♪ Where?
♪ Where have you taken my baby?
♪ Moo
♪ He needs his mother too
♪ You must see the pain in my eyes
♪ Tell me he's still alive
♪ Stop making me pregnant
♪ Why molest me for milk
♪ That you don't need?
♪ Stop making me pregnant
♪ Why strap tubes to my breasts where my baby should be?
♪ I'm not a machine
♪ I'm a mother
♪ And my nipples they bleed
♪ It's my blood in your milk
♪ And there's pus in your milk
♪ Cos it's not your milk
♪ It's my baby's milk
♪ What of kind of animal rapes just for milk?
♪ Let me die
♪ Just let me die
♪ Let me die
♪ Just let me die
♪ Please let me die
♪ Let me die
♪ Please let me die
♪ Let me. ♪