In an early scene of Meat Me Halfway, writer and director Brian Kateman tries to get his parents to eat guacamole. They’re not impressed by their first avocado endeavor. “The color turns me off,” his mother says, making a face. His father feels much the same. “The corn chip, I like!”
Kateman’s journey starts at home as he learns how to persuade people to reduce their meat intake—by as much as they can handle—to reduce our reliance on factory farming and its effects on health, the environment, and animal welfare. In the new documentary, released July 20, Kateman (a Fast Company contributor) spreads his message of reducitarianism, a movement he started in 2014, reasoning that full veganism is not the only way to make a difference to the planet. “We’re very different from a typical go-vegan documentary,” he says. “That was critically important to me.”
Kateman, himself, sticks to largely vegan diet, though he’s found himself slipping, at times scooping a piece of bacon off a friend’s plate. “Reducitarian” sounded better than “lazy vegan” or “cheater,” as both vegan and carnivore acquaintances started to call him. But, in the grand scheme, having a cookie at a friend’s house is not a big deal. “The first step is to get people to stop thinking about vegan-omnivore as a binary,” he says.
His pragmatic attitude is not enough for many hardline activists, but, for Kateman: “We don’t need to be purists,” he says. “We don’t need to be a cult.” When 90% of Americans eat meat, and the average American tucks away 200 pounds of it annually, he sees full veganism as a pipe dream. He agrees that minimal cutbacks are not ideal, but “any change in the positive direction is worth celebrating.”
Still, he understands the animal-activist perspective. The movie’s most emotional scene is when he tears up as he joins them at a “pig vigil,” to protest outside a slaughterhouse by providing evidently tortured, caged pigs with sprays of water before they’re sent to their deathbeds. Though he’s sure a similar experience would move anyone who attended it, he realizes most people won’t. So, the best strategy is to target loved ones with information that meets their immediate concerns. His dad, for instance, was more worried about his declining health than any planetary concerns. His priority was to be around for his family as long as possible. So, Kateman plied him with articles on the relationship between meat and heart disease, which runs in his family.
