By Adam Rabiner
The wonder of the Plow to Plate film series is its marvelous range of topics. Just last month we featured Eat: The Story of Food (Carnivores). According to our post screening report, “to almost everyone's surprise and to the strong aversion of a few, this episode focused on carnivorous diets and featured images of killing floors, meat carcasses and cuts of raw meat being prepared. I was able to assuage the more disturbed viewers with news of the balancing inclusion of Vegucated next month.”
To which I have two things to say. One, I wish our movie fans also read these monthly Gazette reviews or our blog www.plowtoplatefilms.com to avoid any potentially unpleasant surprises! And two, while Vegucated is indeed a film about going vegan, it also features slaughterhouse footage that I would not recommend to anyone who shed a tear reading Charlotte’s web.
Maria Miller Wolfson wrote, directed, narrates, and, somewhat unusually, even stars in Vegucated. She grew up in Evansville, Indiana and her happy childhood was rich in bacon, eggs, and cheese. As an adult, she became aware of the various health, environmental, and ethical issues surrounding meat production and consumption and became a vegan. She found it a relatively smooth transition and wanted to see how easy or difficult a similar process would be for other demographically diverse New Yorkers. Taking out an ad in Craigslist, she interviewed 25 people who said they were up to the challenge of eating vegan for six weeks and narrowed it down to the three featured in the film.
Tesla Lobo is a 22 year old Queens College student who lives with her Hunduran mom and Peruvian dad who grills a mean carne asada. Her parents’ fridge is well stocked with pork chops and steak. She doesn’t cook and to make matters worse, is a finicky eater who hates broccoli and many other vegetables. Her immediate and distant relatives have no idea why she is doing this.
Brian Flegel, 27, is a Manhattan bachelor, a bar-tender and freelance actor, who hails from California. He’s the film’s clown. His mother is German and a good cook so he’s pretty fond of meat. He goes out for breakfast most mornings often ordering bacon, has a frozen rack of lamb in his freezer, doesn’t know how he feels about tofu, and once attempted to eat healthfully by incorporating more chicken into his diet. His parents are understanding but skeptical.
Ellen Mausner is a single working mom living in Coney Island with no time to cook. She’s a psychiatrist by day and a stand-up comic (Ellen Orchid) by night. She and her two children eat a lot of dairy, frozen, and processed foods. Living next to Nathan’s, she’s particularly fond of kosher hot dogs with all the trimmings but is worried because heart disease runs in her family.
Before meeting these three, Maria Miller Wolfson employs the familiar cinematic tropes commonly found in serious documentaries: vintage newsreel footage, playful animation, kitschy music, and then pushes it up a notch. Vegucated includes “man/woman on the street” interviews, custom t-shirts, Wolfson dressed as Charlie Chaplin filmed in choppy black-and-white and scored by piano. Tongue in cheek, she exploits stereotypes about “radical, lesbian, anarchist” vegans with hair growing out of their armpits – for example a staged scene of Wolfson in bed reading the book How the Hetero Capitalist Able-Bodied White Patriarchy Ruined the World by Ruby Elsberg.
Directors, eager to amuse, sometimes resort to these antics for fear that the educational content is too dry. Ms. Wolfson’s use of these techniques is skilled, and she can be genuinely funny, but it is a relief when Tesla, Brian, and Ellen make their appearance and these gimmicks end. This threesome’s journey and their unique personalities are drama enough.
Vegucated is aptly titled, never ceasing to educate. Ms. Wolfson provides her protagonists a crash course in veganism. Over the trajectory of this film they visit supermarkets, bodegas, and various ethnic restaurants to learn how easy it is to buy vegan food. It’s no surprise that Tofurky, Rice Dreams, Veganaise, and other major brands contain no meat products. But who knew that Oreos also fit the bill?
In addition to these initial food forays the three visit Mooshoes, a vegan shoe store on the Lower East Side, attend the Vegetarian Summerfest (the annual conference of the North American Vegetarian Society), camp out at an animal sanctuary, and trespass on a “family farm.” Their collective journey has highs and lows, is easier for some than for others, and is poignant and eye-opening for all.
At the end of six weeks, all three are, to some degree, transformed. They have joined the company of vegetarians Gloria Steinem, Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez, or vegans Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King. They lost some weight, but more importantly, lowered their bad cholesterol and blood pressure.
Vegucated takes its leads and audience on an odyssey - impassioned, often funny, always interesting, and at times emotional - opening everyone’s eyes to what is possible if you put your mind (and stomach) to it.
The wonder of the Plow to Plate film series is its marvelous range of topics. Just last month we featured Eat: The Story of Food (Carnivores). According to our post screening report, “to almost everyone's surprise and to the strong aversion of a few, this episode focused on carnivorous diets and featured images of killing floors, meat carcasses and cuts of raw meat being prepared. I was able to assuage the more disturbed viewers with news of the balancing inclusion of Vegucated next month.”
To which I have two things to say. One, I wish our movie fans also read these monthly Gazette reviews or our blog www.plowtoplatefilms.com to avoid any potentially unpleasant surprises! And two, while Vegucated is indeed a film about going vegan, it also features slaughterhouse footage that I would not recommend to anyone who shed a tear reading Charlotte’s web.
Maria Miller Wolfson wrote, directed, narrates, and, somewhat unusually, even stars in Vegucated. She grew up in Evansville, Indiana and her happy childhood was rich in bacon, eggs, and cheese. As an adult, she became aware of the various health, environmental, and ethical issues surrounding meat production and consumption and became a vegan. She found it a relatively smooth transition and wanted to see how easy or difficult a similar process would be for other demographically diverse New Yorkers. Taking out an ad in Craigslist, she interviewed 25 people who said they were up to the challenge of eating vegan for six weeks and narrowed it down to the three featured in the film.
Tesla Lobo is a 22 year old Queens College student who lives with her Hunduran mom and Peruvian dad who grills a mean carne asada. Her parents’ fridge is well stocked with pork chops and steak. She doesn’t cook and to make matters worse, is a finicky eater who hates broccoli and many other vegetables. Her immediate and distant relatives have no idea why she is doing this.
Brian Flegel, 27, is a Manhattan bachelor, a bar-tender and freelance actor, who hails from California. He’s the film’s clown. His mother is German and a good cook so he’s pretty fond of meat. He goes out for breakfast most mornings often ordering bacon, has a frozen rack of lamb in his freezer, doesn’t know how he feels about tofu, and once attempted to eat healthfully by incorporating more chicken into his diet. His parents are understanding but skeptical.
Ellen Mausner is a single working mom living in Coney Island with no time to cook. She’s a psychiatrist by day and a stand-up comic (Ellen Orchid) by night. She and her two children eat a lot of dairy, frozen, and processed foods. Living next to Nathan’s, she’s particularly fond of kosher hot dogs with all the trimmings but is worried because heart disease runs in her family.
Before meeting these three, Maria Miller Wolfson employs the familiar cinematic tropes commonly found in serious documentaries: vintage newsreel footage, playful animation, kitschy music, and then pushes it up a notch. Vegucated includes “man/woman on the street” interviews, custom t-shirts, Wolfson dressed as Charlie Chaplin filmed in choppy black-and-white and scored by piano. Tongue in cheek, she exploits stereotypes about “radical, lesbian, anarchist” vegans with hair growing out of their armpits – for example a staged scene of Wolfson in bed reading the book How the Hetero Capitalist Able-Bodied White Patriarchy Ruined the World by Ruby Elsberg.
Directors, eager to amuse, sometimes resort to these antics for fear that the educational content is too dry. Ms. Wolfson’s use of these techniques is skilled, and she can be genuinely funny, but it is a relief when Tesla, Brian, and Ellen make their appearance and these gimmicks end. This threesome’s journey and their unique personalities are drama enough.
Vegucated is aptly titled, never ceasing to educate. Ms. Wolfson provides her protagonists a crash course in veganism. Over the trajectory of this film they visit supermarkets, bodegas, and various ethnic restaurants to learn how easy it is to buy vegan food. It’s no surprise that Tofurky, Rice Dreams, Veganaise, and other major brands contain no meat products. But who knew that Oreos also fit the bill?
In addition to these initial food forays the three visit Mooshoes, a vegan shoe store on the Lower East Side, attend the Vegetarian Summerfest (the annual conference of the North American Vegetarian Society), camp out at an animal sanctuary, and trespass on a “family farm.” Their collective journey has highs and lows, is easier for some than for others, and is poignant and eye-opening for all.
At the end of six weeks, all three are, to some degree, transformed. They have joined the company of vegetarians Gloria Steinem, Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez, or vegans Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King. They lost some weight, but more importantly, lowered their bad cholesterol and blood pressure.
Vegucated takes its leads and audience on an odyssey - impassioned, often funny, always interesting, and at times emotional - opening everyone’s eyes to what is possible if you put your mind (and stomach) to it.