Not Another Plant-Based Documentary: A Critical Review of Eating Our Way to Extinction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite mounting evidence that industrial animal agriculture is a formidable force of climate change and mass extinction, many humans remain impervious to this knowledge. Eating Our Way to Extinction is a timely documentary that takes this issue head on. This film review is guided by Alexandra Juhasz’s explanation of media praxis as ‘an enduring, mutual, and building tradition that theorizes and creates the necessary conditions for media to play an integral role in cultural and individual transformation’ (299). Eating Our Way to Extinction attends to some of the most popular strawman arguments against veganism and is widely accessible. That being said, it falls short of its sociopolitical potential because it is beholden to the capitalist-colonial norms of self-interested individualism, promotion of consumerism over movement-building, and using Indigenous peoples as a means to an end. Eating Our Way to Extinction contrasts a worldview based on extraction and domination with one that could actually shift the tide of climate change. It then follows the logic of the extractive worldview by promoting self-interested solutions to a problem that is only exacerbated by capitalism. The fact that Eating Our Way to Extinction acknowledges that Indigenous peoples are more adept at living in an ecologically harmonious way, then silos its viewers into the very mindset that is driving the problem is where the documentary falls flat. At its heart, Eating Our Way to Extinction relies on the Western colonial logics of individualism and capitalism that undercut the social justice demands of veganism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".