Hold the meat

Documentary Forks Over Knives is an unconvincing attempt to lure viewers to vegetables

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, once proclaimed: “Let food be thy medicine.” Roughly 2,500 years later, we’re equally familiar with another dietary axiom, coined by American jour­nalist Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”

But do we follow this advice? In the documentary Forks Over Knives, director Lee Fulkerson denounces the modern “Western Diet,” a high­-fat, animal-­based diet riddled with processed foods and questionable chemicals. (And just in case you don’t quite understand the gravity of the health crisis, Fulkerson doesn’t skimp on dehumanizing videos of obese Americans munching on cheeseburgers and ice cream cones.)

Soon we meet the two likeable leading men, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a genial Cornell University nutri­tional biochemist, and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, a respected former surgeon based at the Cleveland Clinic. Both Campbell and Esselstyn make the contentious claim that by adopting a whole foods, plant­based lifestyle—strangely, “vegan” is never said outright—we can not only avoid degenerative “diseases of afflu­ence,” but even reverse their effects.

An ennobling, utopian conceit, indeed—could curing cancer really be as simple as eating plenty of crudité? Fulkerson sets out to validate these claims by following “reality patients” with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes as they embark on their new plant­-based diets. Cameras linger over jewel­-like heaps of farmer’s market produce and clusters of smiling, thin people eating quinoa. There are three separate trips to upscale grocer Whole Foods (unsurprisingly, the film’s corporate sponsor). It all feels unrealistic and vaguely disingenuous.

The film moves away from the pedantic and regains momentum when Fulkerson mentions the prob­lematic relationship between the food industry and the American federal government. But the film, weighed down by unappealing charts, statistics, and crude animation, lacks a stirring cinematic quality to be anything more than ponderous. If you’d like a little more action, there’s plenty of grotesque, moral­izing imagery: factory workers pumping grey paste into hot dog casings; surgeons grafting leg veins onto a throbbing heart; slabs of destroyed-­looking meat dripping blood onto a barbeque.

“Real men eat plants,” says Rip Esselstyn, a vegan firefighter with bulging muscles. Viewers who’ve embraced veganism will feel validated by Esselstyn’s macho proclamations. But until governments make changes to food policy, this film won’t scare—or shame—many into abandoning their meat and dairy. ■

FORKS OVER KNIVES OPENS THIS FRIDAY, MAY 27

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