Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Michael Moore & Peter Singer

I was doing a little random blog surfing and found this post on Vegan Heart Doc about a letter that PETA wrote to Michael Moore. It looks like PETA's Ingrid Newkirk was trying to sneak in a little vegetarian awareness by congratulating Moore on SICKO while telling him that he doesn't look very healthy and should probably give up meat. (the full letter can be found here).

I kind of agree with the Heart Doc that PETA's letter wasn't the best way to approach Michael Moore. "Hey Mike, you're fat, go veggie!" Hmmm. Great.

This has got me thinking though of how many people Michael Moore could turn vegetarian if he focused his camera on the U.S. factory farming system. Although people still read Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, in today's society a Michael Moore documentary would reach far more people than Singer's book would.

I wish Ms. Newkirk had approached Moore a bit more carefully, slowly pushing the factory farming system his way, hoping he'd grab hold himself. A Michael Moore documentary on factory farming would probably have an effect similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and if it didn't change laws, at the very least it would force people to think about what they were eating.

2 comments:

Jen said...

I was just thinking how great it would be if Moore would team up with Eric Schlosser or Michael Pollan to do a documentary. But Peter Singer would be even better!

Gotta get more people to connect the dots! Your blogs are great at getting people to do that :-)

Smudgemo said...

Shouldn't a letter from PETA ask him to go vegan? An attempt at moderation, perhaps? I'd like to see MM do a documentary on the meat industry. I could see it now:

"Hi, I'm Michael Moore. Is that cow shit on those random leftover parts headed to the hamburger grinder? So, when you lost those fingers in the extractor, did you get them back as a souvenier or did they get fed to school children?"

Sorry, just feeling a bit surly.