Clearly scheduled to give vegetarians and vegans ammunition to shame carnivorous family members around the Easter and Passover dinner table, this passionate but unpersuasive documentary argues that Jesus was probably a vegetarian. Ultimately, the theory gets largely traced back to the apocryphal Gospel of the Ebionites, a text that’s been around since the second century; director Kip Andersen, however, makes a whole song and dance out of “discovering” this notion in a roundabout way, making for an entertainingly barmy quest. By the end, we’re informed that scientists have found the supposedly “happiest human on Earth”: a vegan Buddhist monk named Matthieu Ricard who spends most of his time meditating on compassion and has “high-amplitude gamma activity” in his brain which means it “fires on the highest levels”.
This particular mishmash of pseudoscientific buzz words is delivered via a montage of rostrum shots showing visually highlighted bits of text while an awestruck voiceover from Andersen himself synthesises the ideas. Before we can even absorb this information, the film skittishly moves on to the next notion that all the greatest thinkers in history were vegetarian. Leonardo da Vinci supposedly bought up all the chickens in his local market and then released them into the woods, which would have made the local foxes happy if no one else.
