Romantic Narratives on Nature and Environment in Meat-Focused Food Documentaries

ABSTRACT

The article looks at the discourses of five selected Western food documentaries released in the last decade that deal with meat production and animal agriculture and their impact on the environment, animal welfare, and nature. The article finds that the documentaries employ discourses about nature that involve highly romanticized notions of nature, the environment, and animals that nostalgically harken back to the pre-modern, pastoral, artisanal, and peasant ethos. In the studied documentaries, nature is portrayed as a victim of modern technologies, but also as an avenging and self-restoring entity. Although the Romantic visions of pristine nature and natural meat and food production are grounded in the late eighteenth century, they remain an important source of skepticism and critique of capitalist, industrial, scientific, and technological forms of food- and meat production. By applying the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis, this study reflects on the nature of Romantic representations and the potential meanings of visual, auditory, and linguistic features in the selected documentaries, as well as the potential of Romantic thought to trigger paradigmatic shifts in the way nature is affected by the meat system.

KEYWORDS:

• Nature
• environment
• meat
• Romanticism
• documentary movies

Introduction

In recent decades, the number of food media has continued to increase on a variety of platforms (Lindenfeld 2010, 378). TV shows, trade magazines, blogs, social media channels, and films about food have entered the marketplace in the U.S. and abroad. Food has been linked to environmental, public health, safety, security, and justice issues. Documentaries about food gained popularity and helped put these issues on the public agenda. Food documentaries have gained importance in the twenty-first century, which might be attributed to the increased variety in available foods and global growth of the foodie culture (Leer 2022, 4). There are various subgenres of the food documentary. A significant subgenre is the activist food documentary, such as Food Inc. (2008), which criticizes industrial food production and food systems (Leer 2022, 5) by taking an activist perspective on food issues (Lindenfeld 2010, 379) naming and exposing the main problems of the Western food system. This subgenre has been closely linked to social movements, especially environmental and animal-rights movements.

Moreover, no food topic is as controversial as meat. This is reflected not only in documentaries but also in political, journalistic, and scientific debates. Although meat is seen as a perfect, nutritious, natural, normal, necessary, and enjoyable food (Piazza et al. 2015), its production is cruel to animals, ecologically problematic, and often unsafe and unhealthy for human consumption. Not surprisingly, documentaries seem to reflect antagonistic arguments around meat issues that are already the subject of public debate. Although most documentaries agree that conventional meat production is harmful to the environment, they see different solutions to the problem. These range from not eating meat or proposing ecomodernist solutions such as cultured or plant-based meat to switching to more “natural” and “sustainable” models of livestock production. The debate is informed by documentaries such as Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014), Seaspiracy (2021), and Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed the Planet (2020), all of which argue that we should stop or at least limit eating meat for environmental reasons. Meat the Future (2020) advocates for alternatives such as cultured meat. Documentaries such as MEAT: A Story of Sustainable Food (2017) and Sacred Cow: A Nutritional, Environmental and Ethical Case for Better Meat (2020) defend meat consumption but at the same time advocate against mass meat production. They see agriculture as an important part of Western economy and culture and propose regenerative livestock raising to minimize environmental impacts and animal suffering. Controversies about meat consumption and human health have been addressed by The Game Changers (2018) and The End of Meat (2017), both of which focus on the negative effects meat consumption has on human health. Documentaries such as Beyond Impossible (2022) loudly advocate for carnism, whereas documentaries such as Eating Animals (2017), Dominion (2018), and At the Fork (2016) have built their case against conventional meat production primarily by exposing the impact of meat system on animal welfare and farmers who raise animals for big meat corporations. These documentaries show that the heated debates over meat consumption are not only a matter of public health, animal welfare, and the environment, but, more importantly, a matter of ideological and cultural positioning vis-à-vis what meat represents in Western consumer culture. With the help of documentaries, meat has been brought back from the realm of unthinking mass consumption into the realm of politics, social disputes, and, most importantly, infotainment to address consumer ethics issues and awaken consumer activism (Baron, Carson, and Bernard 2013, 153). In this sense, meat documentaries serve not only as observations but also as social interventions (Duvall 2017, 29).

Media-mediated narratives about meat and food are important objects of analysis because they provide insights into the power of meaning in meat and the pleasure and displeasure of media consumption (Lindenfeld 2010, 378). Since documentaries claim a certain truth and credibility, they also play an important role in the production and reproduction of images of society and in the formation, confirmation, or contestation of worldviews and perceptions among viewers. This explains the importance of analyzing documentaries as documents – that is, as meaningful cultural productions – in the social sciences. Treating documentaries as documents that reflect their time can contribute to the understanding of past and present developments and social expressions (Pollak 2008, 77).

With its focus on documentary films, this study aims to expand on the rapidly developing field of Food Studies, more specifically the current that focuses on food, media, and communication. The latest studies in this field have focused on the analysis of food in relation to social and digital media (Contois et al. 2022; Tovares and Gordon 2022); food and (early) television (Hollows 2022; Tominc 2022); food and film (Hertweck 2015); food documentaries (Leer 2022); food, education and communication (De Iulio 2022); cookbooks and food magazines (Elias 2017); and food, language, and communication (Mapes 2021; Riley and Amy 2019). The cross-disciplinary focus on media/communication and food is therefore not new, with some studies focusing specifically on media portrayals of meat and the meat industry. Studies focusing on the coverage of the environmental impact of livestock production (e.g., Almiron and Zoppeddu 2015; Friedlander, Riedy, and Bonfiglioli 2014; Gutjahr 2013) and advertising (Grauerholz 2007), to name a few, have been conducted.

However, the aim of this study is to analyze the discourses in documentaries that address the impact of the meat industry on the environment, animal welfare, and nature. The study is concerned with the presence of Romantic narratives and ideas about nature and the environment that reappear in the analyzed documentaries. The aim of this article is therefore to examine the meaning and potential of these Romantic ideas in the postmodern context, in which the current meat system is seen as a threat to nature, animals, and the environment. The question addressed in the empirical analysis of this paper is what these Romantic ideas are and how they are incorporated into documentaries. The conclusion discusses whether Romantic ideas play a role in the transition to more environmentally friendly meat production.

Documentaries as multimodal texts

The desire to truthfully represent reality is probably the most distinctive feature of documentaries compared to feature films. Although documentaries give the impression that their content reflects reality, they should not be viewed as simple records of reality but as complex and sophisticated works that can inform, provoke, and entertain audiences (Spence and Navarro 2011, 2). Documentaries should therefore be interpreted as representational paradigms (Hamilton 1997).

Representation is perhaps the most important part of the process of meaning production and meaning exchange between the members of the same culture. In the case of documentary film, representation is part of a negotiation of meaning between the filmmaker, the audience, and reality. Whether we watch documentaries that deal with social issues or those that reflect and narrate social or natural reality in general, we always see representations of that reality, no matter how realistic they are meant to appear. Meaning is constructed in relation to culture and works together with language and representation in the process of signifying the world around us. However, meaning does not depend on the materiality of the world but on its symbolic function, which is constructed in culture (Hall 1997). For these reasons, the analysis of documentaries should be based on discursive and semiotic approaches, as both presuppose that phenomena are constructed through visual, spoken, or written language. The process of representation in documentaries involves the use of film language, signs, and images used in documentary forms to represent things, actors, and phenomena. Thus, in analyzing documentary films, we are looking for discursive and semiotic constructions of truth. Our analysis is therefore centered on rhetoric, persuasion, and argument, audio-visual and linguistic, rather than on the reproduction of images and facts (Nichols 1991).

The camera angle used, the position of the people in the frame, the lighting, the color, the editing, the music, and the sound are instances of “film language,” all of which have the potential for social and symbolic meaning, and the same applies to spoken and written language. We need to understand how this complex sign system works to grasp what we call the connotative meaning of texts, that is, their implicit sociocultural and “personal” (ideological, emotional, etc.) associations (Barthes 1977; Chandler 2007, 138). The work of all these activities is called signification – the making of meaning – and the methodology for capturing this meaning is called multimodal analysis¹ (Machin and Mayr 2012). Once we understand the basic premises of multimodal analysis, we can apply it to the particular “signifying practices” of film, that is, the various media and technologies through which cinematic meanings are produced (Turner 1999, 55).

In the following analysis, I have focused on the multimodal dimensions of documentary film. This involves the use of multimodal critical discourse analysis to decode the lexical and grammatical choices in the language as well as to decode audio-visual choices and features (Machin and Mayr 2012, 7). The analysis focuses on the linguistic level, in which the verbatim transcripts of the documentaries are analyzed, as well as on audio-visual materials. For this analysis, I selected documentaries in which meat is the central theme.² I selected five documentaries that have been released in the last ten years: Cowspiracy: The Secret of Sustainability (2014), Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed the Planet (2020), Sacred Cow: A Nutritional, Environmental and Ethical Case for Better Meat (2020), Eating Animals (2017), and Dominion (2018).

Romantic conception of nature and the environment

Although Romanticism³ was primarily an artistic and intellectual movement that emerged in the last decade of the 18th century, its authors and thinkers pursued a strong political agenda (Löwy and Robert 2001; McCarrager 2019). It developed in response to societal changes, particularly industrialization, urbanization, modern natural sciences, and technological innovations associated with the emergence and spread of industrial capitalism in the 18th century (Löwy and Robert 2001). The Romantic era was also an important period in the emergence of environmentalism, as writers began to express an interest in the natural world (Oerlemans 2002, 3). Ecology initially developed as knowledge about the relationship between living things and their environment and it was not until the late 19th century that it started to consider the impact of humans on nature (Bate 1991). The term “environment” was applied to social contexts because of the sense of alienation caused by life in the city noted by the Romanticists. Prior to the 19th century, personal and communal identities were unquestionably closely linked to the physical environment, with the influence of climate and soil taken for granted. In the late 18th century, however, people became increasingly aware of the tendency of industry to alter the quality of the environment. Most rural and urban landscapes were influenced by the hand of man. The “natural” countryside was therefore contrasted with the “artificial” urban areas. The word “environment” emerged as a sign of this difference (Bate 1991, 13–14).

The Romanticists were critical of how rural life and the natural landscape were changing in the wake of industrialization and urbanization, and lamented the loss of rural traditions and the changes in wild nature. They idealized the land and nature that they knew from the past and their childhood, and described how they were being destroyed by the industrialized mode of production (Williams 1975, 138). They saw these changes as a loss of the pristine landscape, a loss of nature, and a loss of rural community. This Romantic, nostalgic look back at the rural past challenges human – nature relationships and lost certainties (Williams 1975, 139). The melancholy of loss and dissolution that was so pronounced in the literature of the late 18th century (Williams 1975, 68, 130) reemerges in contemporary documentaries about food production and the environment.

In the following sections, I will show how documentaries on meat view meat production through the lens of Romanticism. I will explore the Romantic response to the industrial destruction of nature grounded in the return to the pre-industrial ideas of pastoralism mimicking the natural coexistence of land, animals, and people. The Romantic idea of humans in harmony with their environment reflects the idea that agriculture should mimic the processes in nature. People should live harmoniously with their environment by rejecting the industrial, mechanical, and technological ways of producing food, and instead engage in smaller, human-powered technologies that are closer to natural and artisanal processes than the industrial ones that take place in cities (McKusick 2000, 105). In the documentaries, this idea is evident when the proposals for regenerative agriculture are highlighted as helping to restore a degraded environment by following the laws of nature.

Techno-skepticism and victimized nature

In contrast to Enlightenment thinkers, who saw progress in the development of technological innovations and the exploitation of natural resources for human purposes, the Romantic artistic movement, expressed in painting, literature, and music, was concerned with the negative effects of science, industry, and capitalism on nature (McCarrager 2019). Since its beginnings, industrialization has driven development and technological progress in the industrial sector. However, its side effects were traffic congestion, noise, pollution, lack of drinking water, and contagious diseases that spread in urban areas due to rapid population growth. For poets, painters, and literary figures of the Romantic period, the negative effects of urbanization and industrialization were a major concern (McKusick 2000, 96; Williams 1975). However, another concern was related to the industrial destruction of natural landscapes and the “utilitarian” relation of human beings to nature (Löwy 1987), which was often seen to be grounded in scientific innovations that supported humanity’s goal to gain power over nature and its resources (Merchant 1980). The power relations between nature and humans became unbalanced, and nature came to be seen as a victim of human advancements (Plumwood 1993). The following example shows how this is reflected in the documentary Eating Animals.

This transformation now is called the Anthropocene. This is the period that’s dominated by humanity. We are the Goliath and nature in all of its forms is the David. There’s never been a time in world history in which there’s been so many people with so much access to the conditions of a decent life. There’s also never been any point in human history when there have been so many people who don’t have access to the necessary conditions of a decent life.

(Eating animals)

In the example above, personification, a lexical form in which human properties or capacities are assigned to abstract or inanimate objects (Heymans 2012, 171), discloses unequal power relations between nature and humans. In this case, the unequal relations of power are expressed through social relations between victim and victimizer. The modern relationship between man and nature is represented by the biblical figures Goliath, who represents the oppressor, and David, who represents the oppressed nature. This example portrays nature as a passive victim of modern agricultural practices, reflecting the Romantic response to the Enlightenment goal of knowing, controlling, and exploiting nature for human purposes.

The documentaries that embrace the Romantic view of science and technology emphasize that the use of scientific innovations, such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides to raise feed for livestock and genetic manipulation of animals to improve meat production, are divorced from the natural and artisanal process of raising animals. In the following example from Sacred Cow, scenes from an old USDA-produced propaganda film, Miracles from Agriculture (1960), are used to show the mentality behind the post-World War II Green Revolution. Sacred Cow aims to explain how the scientific innovations during the Green Revolution negatively affected traditional farming methods after World War II. In the following example, the insertion of the propaganda film portrays the use of chemical fertilization and mechanization as “liberating” and “miraculous” in achieving a better and more abundant life for people. However, the commentary by an expert who appears in the Sacred Cow offers a critical perspective on these practices.

[Miracles from agriculture]: On the farm today, wherever you look, you see the handiwork of scientists: improved crops, more productive. [Patrick Holden CBE Funding director, sustainable food trust]: That system has separated livestock production from grain production. It’s had profound consequences for the way we produce food. [ominous music]

(Sacred Cow)

The expert’s utterances are accompanied by fast-moving images of endless fields of monocultures. The ominous music⁴ that plays in the scene triggers negative emotions of danger and fear, suggesting that chemically fertilized crops used as animal feed are a danger to humanity and the planet.

In response to the rationalist approaches and scientific development of the Enlightenment, the Romanticists were concerned with the failures of scientific attempts to overcome the laws of nature. The Romanticists’ fear of scientific mistakes backfiring and destroying humanity was often related to scientific experimentation and is perhaps most evident in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein or Modern Prometheus (2018), in which scientific experimentation on dead human bodies resulted in a monster creature that was meant to be society’s slave but became its destroyer (Pepper 1996, 191). The novel reflects the Romanticists’ deep skepticism about the supposed benefits the scientific and technological advances of the Enlightenment can offer to humanity (McKusick 2000, 231). In the analyzed documentaries, the role of science in meat production is seen as problematic for the same reasons. This is because science challenges the laws of nature by using inventions, such as the genetic manipulation of animals and crops, to increase productivity. The following two examples from Dominion and Eating Animals address the effects of genetic modification on farmed turkeys:

Genetic alterations and artificial lighting (are used) to maximize feeding, contribute to a growth rate double that of their wild counterparts. They rapidly reach a weight their legs cannot support. Living in their own waste, wounds can quickly become infected. The frequency of deaths increases with age to an average rate of 3–5% for females near the end of their 12-week lifespan in the sheds, and 10–12% for males near the end of their 16-week lifespan. The dead birds are collected and dumped like rubbish.

(Dominion)

Turkeys have been so genetically altered that they’re no longer even capable of having sex. They’re all artificially inseminated. I learned that because corporations want to pay less for feed and Americans like the taste of fat. Today’s meat birds have been bred with mutant obese genes to grow faster and fatter than ever imaginable before. So much faster and fatter that if a human baby had her growth similarly accelerated, a two-month-old would weigh more than six hundred pounds. They’re trapped in these bodies that keep them from doing normal animal behavior. Well, abnormal is now called normal.

(Eating Animals)

The scene from Dominion shows a crowded farm with turkeys struggling to stay on their feet. Often, close-ups are used to show the birds’ faces and eyes to allow the audience to have an imagined relationship with the animal being portrayed. In images as in real life, the distance of objects/subjects from the camera represents the distance in social relationships. In images, distance means the “size of the frame” (close-up, medium, and long shot), which indicates how closely the viewer feels connected to the object being filmed. Close-ups therefore allow the audience to emphatically engage with the birds’ emotions and state of mind (Machin & Mayr 2012, 97, 99). To fully realize the dramatic potential of the depicted suffering, close-ups showing the bird’s body parts are used to draw the viewer’s eye to the animal’s changes, defects, and wounds. Although the pace of the voice-over appears to be steady, long pauses are used to allow the diegetic sounds of the birds’ laments to be heard, making the narrative seem more realistic (Turner 1999, 66). The diegetic sounds are juxtaposed with the non-diegetic sounds of quiet instrumental piano music, which enhance the mood of the suffering animals and the sad atmosphere that conveys the emotional meaning of the scene and reflects the true and real feelings of the animals involved (Firth in Turner 1999, 67). Turkeys having difficulty walking are shown collapsing on the ground and stampeded by a flock of stronger birds. These images convey the helplessness of injured and deformed turkeys and elicit feelings of sadness, pity, and compassion. The scene creates a perspective in which the suffering is perceived as unjust and targets the audience’s outrage and anger toward the meat industry.

In the footage of the example from Dominion, weak turkeys are shown on the farm floor with their feet strangely curved and looking severely deformed. The footage shows graphic close-ups of infected wounds to draw the viewer’s attention to explicit images. The footage shows a dying turkey taking its last breath. The audience gets to see more shots of dead turkeys, some of which are already decomposing. At the end of the scene, a hole in the ground with dead birds is shown. Close-ups show warm-blooded birds eating dead bodies. Sick and deformed turkeys no longer look like appealing pieces of a juicy thanksgiving delight, but rather appear repulsive and inedible. Similarly deformed animals are presented in Eating Animals. The turkeys are called “mutants,” which, in biology, refers to living things whose DNA has been scientifically altered from its natural sequence. The scene from Eating Animals expresses a clear cause-and-effect relationship between genetic alterations and animal diseases. The depiction of disfigured, diseased, and even dead birds “disrupts the epistemological and visual process by which animals acquire the status of food by being portrayed as in some way unfit for consumption” (Smaill 2014, 84). It also challenges the instrumentalist rationality of mass meat production as well as the scientific interventions in it. Shelley’s (2018) critique of the power of scientific ambition intervening in natural processes to better humanity, with the Frankenstein creature experiment backfiring, is similar to the documentary’s critique of the refinement of animal bodies for the purpose of maximizing profit and satisfying human desire for meat. However, scientific experimentation with animal genes and breeding techniques not only harms birds but also the human habit of consuming them. The recognition of the negative impact the food industry and technologies have on the environment and animal welfare is driving documentary narratives away from scientific invention and toward Romantic narratives about nature. As I show in the next sections, nature is seen as a benevolent, sublime, and self-regulating organism, as well as an avenging force that triggers apocalyptic imaginaries.

Nature as a self-restoring organism

Romanticism opposed the way in which the Cartesian approach abstracted individual aspects of nature from its whole. Instead, it saw nature as an autonomous and self-regulated total organism in which man is one with nature and its beings. Romanticism therefore challenged the idea of a dualistic separation between mind and matter and between subject and object. The instrumental relations between man and nature characteristic of Cartesianism saw man as rational and separate from an observable and exploitable nature, which was compared to an organic machine (Kenyon-Jones 2016). If Enlightenment saw nature as passive, manageable, and full of exploitable resources (animals and plants for food, water for energy, etc.) (Pepper 1996, 134, 141; Perkins 2007, 3), Romanticism, on the other hand, saw nature as an active organism. Nature was portrayed as organic and alive, capable of functioning independently of human intervention.This is evident in the following example from the documentary Apocalypse Cow. The scene shows narrator George Monbiot marveling at the ability of the wild to restore itself in an area in the Netherlands where agriculture has been abandoned. The scene shows Monbiot on a boat with a local park ranger. They observe and comment on the restored natural habitat full of fresh water, birds, insects, meadows, trees, and other plants.

[Monbiot]: This land beside the River Rhine has been turned from a dairy and maize farm into a thriving ecosystem. Every way I look, I’m seeing something which makes my heart go, “Oh! Boom-boom!” Because it’s so lovely. The dragonflies, the frogs, the birds, the wind in the trees, and it is beautiful. The sound of poplars. The sound of those poplars. It’s almost as if they’re singing. [Ranger]: I think everybody should come to this place to see what can happen in such a short time. Really, imagine, like, 25–30 years ago, the trees were not here, the plants in the water were not here, so it all came back in a couple of decades or even less. [Monbiot]: Astonishing./…/[Ranger]: We didn’t plant anything here. The seeds came in, birds brought the seeds. Can you imagine, in 1993, this was still maize? It was one big crop field. [Monbiot]: It was a field of maize, a growing crop? [Ranger]: Yeah. So, like, biodiversity was, like, one plant. [Monbiot]: This explosion of wildlife is happening./…/[Monbiot]: Life is rolling back into this region, the beavers, the eagles, they’re returning. Recently, and with no human intervention, wolves crossed the border from Germany and set up home nearby./…/This profusion of life, all pouring into a place the moment the pressure is off, and nature is allowed to do its own thing and, boom, you get this explosion of wildlife. Rewilding projects like this offer hope for the world. We can reverse ecological collapse.

(Apocalypse Cow)

The narrator’s Romantic conception of restored nature triggers strong feelings of excitement about the restored habitat. “My heart go[es], ‘Oh! Boom-boom,’” Monbiot says. Like the Romanticists, he verbally praises nature for its majesty, richness, and beauty (Bate 1991), and especially for its capacity for self-restoration. Like in Romanticism, nature is seen as a self-functioning organism that regains its balance and harmony once farming is abandoned. The example shows how the narrator follows the Romantic notion of nature’s vibrancy and its ability to restore and keep its system alive independent of human intervention. The vibrancy and liveliness of nature are also evident in the footage of animals moving in their natural environment and plants swaying in the breeze. The genre of music that accompanies the scene is classical; the piece is powerful, suggesting the strength and size of the natural organism. From this passage, the audience learns that nature is more beautiful when it is not damaged by agriculture destroying the natural habitat, and that it does not need human intervention to restore its organism. Man’s management of nature and its resources, as advocated by Enlightenment thinkers, is rejected and perceived as disturbing the balance of nature. In addition to portraying nature as active, nature in Romanticism often took on human characteristics (McKusick 2000; Oerlemans 2002, 34). Mountains and rivers are described as resembling human body parts, such as “brows,” “shoulders,” “feet,” “heads,” “gorges,” and “mouths” (Pepper 1996, 134, 141; Perkins 2007, 3). Elements of nature, such as the sun, moon, wind, ice, and even animals, are described as conscious entities that apparently choose to behave as they do (Oerlemans 1994, 19). The Romantic view of the natural world as an integral community is expressed through personifications. In this case, personifications attempt to denote the organic relationship between natural objects (McKusick 2000, 55). This is evident in the following examples from Eating Animals and The Sacred Cow.

… the rivers that fed the lake to provide water for their crops and farm animals.

(Eating Animals)

[Judith Schwartz-Author Cows Save the Planet]: Our beautiful landscapes, the grasslands of the world, the grasslands with really, really rich soils, were co-created with ruminant animals. They are helping to build healthy soil. They’re helping to add carbon to the soil in so many ways: through their waste, the organic matter, through the fact that they are pressing down plant material so that it can be acted upon by microorganisms, and that stimulates the whole process of the plants growing and the plants sending down carbon into the soil.

(Sacred Cow)

In the first example, cows, rivers, and lakes appropriate human behavior. Rivers “feed” and “provide” plants and animals with water, just as a mother would supply her child with her milk. In the second example, plants and cows are “adding” carbon to the soil, “pressing down,” and “sending down” to restore the soil’s natural balance. They are personified in such a way that their actions are similar to human actions, which resemble rational and intentional behavior, such as “helping” and “sending.”

Avenging nature and apocalypticism

A Romantic radicalization of the notion of nature’s agency and autonomy leads to representations of nature as an avenging force. For Romanticists, nature ultimately has power over man (Heymans 2012; McKusick 2000). This awareness is also evident in documentaries. When Eating Animals discusses the negative impact of mass meat production on the environment, a farmer says:

There’s the laws of men and the laws of nature. The final word is gonna come from Mother Nature herself.

(Eating Animals)

This example emphasizes that man and nature conform to different laws. Nevertheless, the power of nature over man should not be underestimated. It is Mother Nature who has the “last word”; idiomatically speaking, she makes the final decision. The conceptual metaphor of nature as a mother draws attention to the processes of care and nurturing, as well as parental authority, as both can be interpreted as the metaphor’s source domains (Hogan and Martin 2011; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Whereas in the Enlightenment power rested with man, primarily because of his ability to think rationally, in Romanticism, nature was seen as a powerful force that made man seem insignificant and humble. The unpredictable, sublime nature was a Romantic idea commonly found in painting. Romantic painters (Joseph Mallord William Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, Joseph Wright of Derby, and John Martin) depict motifs of natural disasters – fires, avalanches, earthquakes, and storms that threaten human existence. Romantic descriptions of the environment are a comprehensive catalog of environmental damage and destruction of the Earth’s capacity: silenced birds, smoke-obscured landscapes, dying herds, crop failures, poisoned harvests, devastating storms are the themes that Romanticism embraced. The Romanticists claimed that the environment was devastated, and that the destruction came from science, technology, industrialization, and humanity itself (McKusick 2000, 103, 107). The Romanticists’ concern for a possible apocalypse in which the destruction of the Earth would affect its ability to sustain human life is reflected in documentaries (McKusick 2000, 95–96). The narrator of Apocalypse Cow makes this clear when he says the Earth is:

/ … /losing its capacity to support us. It’s being damaged so quickly that, according to the UN, we have just 60 years of harvests left. At this rate, farming won’t be able to feed the growing human population.

(Apocalypse Cow)

The very title of the documentary Apocalypse Cow links livestock with apocalyptic scenarios of Earth destruction. In both Apocalypse Cow and Cowspiracy, it is claimed that livestock farming causes severe damage to the environment, suggesting that factory farming has apocalyptic consequences. At the beginning of Cowspiracy, the narrator, Kif, explains man’s impact on global warming. The narration is accompanied by rapidly changing images of massive storms, wildfires, vast parched landscapes, melting glaciers, and cars driving through a flood, creating a sense of realism and overwhelmingness. Sudden cuts between the images are used for dramatic effect to create surprise, horror, and disruption (Turner 1999, 71). The intersecting narrative is presented in the following example and clearly problematizes the impact of meat production and consumption on the environment.

Narrator Kif: Climate change stands to affect all life on this planet. From monster storms, raging wildfires, record droughts, ice caps melting, acidification of the oceans, to entire countries going underwater, that could all be caused by humans’ demands on the Earth./…/(T)he meat and dairy industry produces more greenhouse gases than the exhaust of all cars, trucks, trains, boats, planes combined./…/Methane gas from livestock is 86 times more destructive than carbon dioxide from vehicles.

(Cowspiracy)

Similarly, Monbiot describes the situation in Apocalypse Cow.

[Monbiot]: We all know the world is in trouble. [TV on the street]: We’’re facing a man-made disaster of global scale. [Monbiot]: And we keep being told how to fix it … but getting rid of plastic straws or flying less isn’t going to be enough. There’s a bigger culprit that hardly anyone is talking about. The food industry is destroying the living world. And it appears to be insatiable. Until now, farming has been essential to human survival. But I believe we’re about to leave the agricultural age. We’re going to see one of the biggest disruptions in human history … and it might just save us from catastrophe.

(Apocalypse Cow)

Words such as extinction, war, disaster, destruction, disruption, and catastrophe are used to express the severity of the environmental impact of meat production. All words have connotative meanings and are therefore important to the analysis of the discourse (Barthes 1977). The words mentioned above represent apocalyptic imaginaries. Although global apocalypse is a theme with a long history in Western literature, going back at least as far as the cataclysmic Flood described in Genesis and the fiery doom predicted in the Book of Revelation, the Industrial Revolution marked the first time that such apocalyptic events became imaginable as the result of normal human activity rather than an inscrutable act of God. In the early years of the nineteenth century, as the industrial cities of England choked in smog, it became possible to imagine that new technologies of mass production would alter the climate and eventually destroy the Earth’s ability to sustain life (McKusick 2000, 95).

Longing for the lost nature and hope for a better future

The documentaries’ response to modern apocalypticism, based on the Romantic ethical rejection of capitalist industrial societies (McNeish 2017, 1045), brings forth the nostalgic view of lost nature. As Pepper (1996, 190) points out, “The Romantics hated how industrialization made previously beautiful places ugly./…/Romantics separated themselves from both this vulgar bourgeoisie and the working proletariat (but not the traditional ‘agricultural’ peasantry).” A farmer’s labor was seen as artisanal. In contrast to industrialized food and meat production, farmers were close to nature and were therefore glorified by the Romantic movement. The Romanticists believed that farming should be associated with simple useful skills, such as traditional animal husbandry, while mechanical production, such as industrial meat production, was associated with the destruction of nature and was therefore rejected (Pepper 1996; Williams 1975). The poet John Clear wrote about the destruction of the natural environment, the draining of swamps and marshes, the relocation of rivers, the clearing of forests and scrublands, and the transition of traditional farming giving way to capital-intensive farming. Romantic poems depicted the landscape from the perspective of a local peasant, shepherd, or woodman. The Romantic view of industrially destroyed nature was melancholic and often nostalgic. It described the gradual disappearance of common fields, marshes, and lands and the extinction of harmonious natural life (McKusick 2000). The nostalgic memory was accompanied by melancholy feelings of a wild and intact nature, visions of grazing herds, tranquil waters, a calm, luminous sky, and images of perfect harmony between man and nature (Pepper 1996, 203). The nostalgic view of the landscapes of rural life takes the Romantic imaginary back to pre-industrial times, when wild natural landscapes coexisted with traditional forms of animal husbandry. Romantic interest in the folk societies of the past is premised on the idea that they were closer to nature, simpler, and more honest than modern urban spaces, which were seen as corrupt and degraded (Pepper 1996, 191–192). For the Romanticists, the qualities of natural beauty were a very important legacy of rural life. The integrity and importance of nature were not dependent on humans (Pepper 1996, 192). For the Romanticists, the past was always better than the present. Similarly, the narrator of Apocalypse Cow describes what rural landscapes looked like before factory farming and compares them to the degraded state they are in today.

[Monbiot]: These bare hills were once covered with a rich mosaic of trees, of shrubs, all sorts of other plants, teeming with wild animals. And now? It’s a sheep-wrecked desert. Because they love eating tree seedlings, sheep are highly effective at destroying rich living systems, and the wildlife they harbour. It’s amazing how little there is up here. There’s rocks, there’s grass, there’s a bit of moss. I’ve seen two birds the whole of the way up this mountain and the trees stopped a few hundred metres down. But what there is in abundance … is sheep poo.

(Apocalypse Cow)

In the above example, trees and plants are described as “teeming with wild animals,” all of which forms an autonomous organic natural system, “a mosaic.” Whereas in the past, the hills were covered with “a rich mosaic of trees, of shrubs, all sorts of other plants” and wild animals, today they are “a sheep-wrecked desert” with rocks, grass, moss, and “sheep poo,” destroyed by massive sheep grazing. The example also shows the narrator’s attachment to his local environment, which is typical of Romanticism. The local environment is where he gains intimate knowledge of the relationships of all life forms (McKusick 2000, 91). The nostalgic look back also includes a return to pre-industrial and forgotten forms of animal husbandry. The next two examples show a farmer looking back nostalgically at the way poultry was raised before the massification of meat production.

The White Jersey Giant was a wonderful breed. Extremely slow-growing and everything and that’s part of the reason why they lost favor. Other than the 40 or 50 I have here there’s probably not another 20 in the whole world. Everything I’m doing here is nothing new. In fact, this is all very, very old.

(Eating Animals)

From the above example, we can see how the old-fashioned artisanal way of quietly raising birds is preferred to industrialized forms of meat production. Romantic writers touch on the lost spirit of community and the isolation caused by the selfish fall of ordinary society (Williams 1975, 131). As Williams (1975, 137) notes, Romantic poets speak about the loss of the “old country.” The cultivation of natural feelings is expropriated by the consequences of improved management of the land; wealth is not only harsh and cruel but also distasteful, he says. For the farmers who appear in the documentaries, however, looking to the past involves not only technical methods of animal husbandry but also a nostalgic remembrance of the aspects of poultry keeping associated with the rural community now lost to capitalist industry. The same farmer comments on this as follows:

This is poultry farming 50 years ago. There was this wonderful system of farmers who got together and supported each other to produce the best. That is completely gone today.

(Eating Animals)

According to Sacred Cow, grazing livestock should be adapted to the laws of nature to bring modern practices of meat production in line with peasant ideas of the past. The following example shows how mimicking and mirroring natural processes in raising animals for meat production is becoming an important response to environmental challenges. The goal of raising livestock in a way that mimics natural processes, that is, “naturally,” is described by a farmer in the following example.

Electric fencing allows us to very cheaply steer a herd of a thousand animals more precisely than wolves and bison did 500 years ago. Moving cattle frequently through small sections of a field, called managed or mobbed grazing, mirrors how animals graze in nature, allowing cows to naturally fertilize the soil, and giving grass time to recover. This management style contrasts with the more common practice of allowing animals access to an entire pasture for the season, leading to over- or undergrazed sections, more exposed soil, and less healthy animals./…/I’m raising cows as an ecological management tool.

(Sacred Cow)

The Sacred Cow expresses itself in similar ways throughout the documentary. The farmers and narrator call for modern grazing to “mimic, rather than dominate nature,” “mimic what nature used to do,” and manage “the cow in a way that it will mimic nature.” One of the shots shows a rancher moving cows in the diffuse backlight of the sun, suggesting softness, nostalgia, and romance. The footage appears in slow motion, while the music is instrumental and quiet, signifying the slow pace of rural life and its aestheticization (Turner 1999, 57). This creates a counterbalance to the fast-paced capitalist and industrialized life, where the hyper-production of food and meat triggers consumer alienation from traditional food production processes.

From the above examples, it is clear that nature is understood as a balanced, autonomous system that requires man’s adaptation to nature, not man’s domination and exploitation of nature. Man is allowed to participate in natural processes but only if he maintains his natural behavior. Harmonization between man and nature should bring about the restoration of natural habitats, plants, and animals characteristic of the past. The documentaries are full of hope for the future. A farmer from the Sacred Cow expresses his view on how cooperation between man and nature will bring back the lost wildlife and an intact nature:

We started seeing multiple species of perennial grasses. Wildlife just exploded: these mule deer, golden eagle, these foxes and bobcats, and all these creatures that were long before us. We don’t have to fight nature, so we can work with nature to restore the original habitat. There is hope, and then we can do it. [tranquil music]

(Sacred Cow)

The visual design of the final scene of Apocalypse Cow consists of shots of a natural habitat with trees reflected in clear, fresh water, green landscapes, ponds, and tall grass swaying in the gentle wind. The light is soft, pleasant, and natural. Monbiot is filmed backlit, with his figure standing amid tall grass. He watches the horizon through binoculars. The scene suggests optimism and the hope he has for the future. This is consistent with the Romantic notion of the future, glimpsing the future from the dark present. In documentary and Romantic poetics, the future is contained in the past, and the past will blossom in the future (Laniel-Musitelli and Celine 2021, xv).

Conclusion

The question of preserving the natural environment, of the harmonious coexistence of man and nature, was of central importance to Romanticism. Since nature was seen as a pure source of renewal, Romanticists considered going “back to nature” as the solution to escape industrialization and capitalist food production, which caused the detachment of man from nature. Romantic questions about the possibility of sustainable development are still relevant and fiercely contested today, and many contemporary participants in this public debate would be well advised to consult Romantic thinkers and artists for useful insights about the intimate connections between nature and society’s behavior toward the natural world. The Romanticists remained deeply concerned about the future development of parts of the world, especially as their ecological integrity was threatened by the advance of wealth, industry, and modern lifestyles, and their writings attest to a growing understanding of the complex ecological connections between people and the places they inhabit (McKusick 2000, 80).

Thus, the resurgence of Romanticism in contemporary documentaries about meat is no accident. Romanticism still has something to say because “the crisis of civilization associated with the genesis and development of industrial capitalism is far from having been resolved” (Milner in Sayre and Löwy 1984, 54). A confrontation with the consequences of modernity characterized by capitalist industrial transformation is not only a phenomenon of the 19th century. Romantic anti-capitalism and anti-industrialism are essential parts of modern culture. It is a worldview with growing importance (Sayre and Löwy 1984, 42–43; Sayre and Löwy 2020). The Romantic response to the contemporary meat system, which was the subject of the documentaries analyzed herein, has evolved from continuous changes in society. Industrial revolutions (from the 1st to the 4th) as well as capitalist ideas of growth, acceleration, expansion, and maximization have been the triggers for Romantic narratives for over two centuries. Romantic notions that have emerged since the dawn of industrial production resurfaced during the consolidation of the neoliberal order in the 1980s and 1990s. The relatively recent realization that the limitless growth of food- and especially meat production and consumption is damaging the environment brought the Romantic notions back to life. As I have shown, these ideas express their disdain for capitalism and modern industrial society by addressing its social and environmental impacts and advocating for pre-capitalist values (Sayre and Löwy 1984, 46). It is therefore crucial to understand the Romantic commentary on the meat system in the context of the broader socioeconomic reality in which the meat system operates today. The capitalist implications do not only involve environmental degradation and commodification of farm animals but also the position of workers in the meat industry, the position of farmers vis-à-vis the large meat corporations, the growing debt of farmers and the lack of profit, and the disappearance of the farming profession. They also involve the transformation of rural areas that are depopulated, depredated, and abandoned.

However, what are the implications of the Romantic nostalgia of the pre-capitalist era (Sayre and Löwy 1984, 56) conveyed through a popular genre such as the documentary film? Documentaries inform and reflect the ongoing public debate about how Malthusian, animal welfare, and ecological problems should be solved in the near future by proposing and communicating ideas and engaging in the debate about the future of meat. The Romantic proposal to bypass capitalist forms of mass meat production seems relevant in today’s world, where environmental degradation comes mainly from the agricultural sector, especially livestock. The crucial question, therefore, is whether the identified nostalgic representations of nature as an organic system, as a victim, and as an avenging force have the potential to trigger action and initiate paradigmatic changes in the way humanity understands the relationship between humans and nature/animals. It seems that Romantic representations have their potential because, as Wallerstein (1998) would put it, they envision a utopistics⁵ in which humanity could develop and implement alternatives to the current capitalist food system that endlessly accumulates capital through the exploitation of nature and animals. The key question, therefore, is whether and how the Romantic critique of the way the meat system has been managed since modernity can be transformed into a political project that goes beyond the nostalgic, apocalyptic, and victimizing framework of the representation of nature. Instead, it should enable a material (rather than just symbolic) transformation of the power relationship between humans and animals and nature.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions to the manuscript. I would also like to thank Domen for his enormous support when writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research is part of a project supported by the Fulbright program.

Notes

1. Regarding the visual material, the analysis focused especially on camera angle and frame, editing, and lighting. Regarding sound, the analysis focused mainly on diegetic and non-diegetic sound, especially music. Regarding language, the focus was on idiomatic language (metaphors, metonymies, personifications), and the connotative meaning of words.

2. I sampled the material in the following way: Using the Google search engine, I first created a list of documentaries dealing with meat by using the keywords “documentary” AND “meat.” Secondly, I limited my search to the 2012–2022 period, as I was interested in the recent representations of animals and meat in documentaries. A list of nine documentaries on meat was created. The transcripts of the documentaries were obtained and coded in MAXQDA2020 along with the images and audio features. In the next step, I narrowed down the selection of documentaries to include only those that dealt predominantly with nature and the environment, including animals, in the context of meat production. Examples from these five documentaries (see above) are examined in this study. The selected examples that I present in this article are representative of many similar cases that occur in the selected documentaries. Along with Romanticism, the ecomodern perspective was also present, though not to the same degree. Due to the vastness of the topic, the article focuses only on the Romantic features.

3. In this article, the term “Romanticism” is used in the context of Romantic literature and art, referring to examples of artistic creativity as examples of cultural criticism of industrial society (Löwy and Robert 2001). However, the article only focuses on limited aspects of Romanticism, i.e., the part of Romantic artistic expression that deals with animals and nature and draws inspiration from the pre-capitalist values that draw their moral and political imagination from the past, particularly from the peasant and artisan communities of the pre-modern era (Löwy 1987; Löwy and Robert 2001; McCarrager 2019).

4. The purpose of music in film helps the audience realize the meaning of scenes. It gives them dramatic and emotional value, and it supports the film narrative (Prendergast 1992, 2013).

5. For those unfamiliar with the concept: speaking of utopistics in relation to utopias, Wallerstein defines utopistics as “the serious assessment of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgment regarding the substantive rationality of possible alternative historical systems” (Wallerstein 1998, 65).