Political Media Review

Behind the Mask, a production of Uncaged Films and ARME directed and produced by Shannon Keith, is an outstanding and thought provoking documentary about the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Winner of numerous awards, the seventy-two minute investigative film weaves together interviews with some of the leading figures in the animal liberation movement with undercover footage of animals in laboratories, as well as being liberated and in loving sanctuaries.

Norm Phelps book, The Longest Struggle: From Pythagoras To PETA, constructs a broad historical narrative that makes new and important sense of Western history from the perspective of animal advocacy and vegetarianism. By working from the animal and vegetarian standpoints, Phelps uncovers aspects of Western history that are as crucial to understand as they are systematically ignored.

Previous consumer pressure has resulted in the passage of government regulations that ensure food producers provide more information about their products. Food labels must contain ingredient listings and basic nutritional information breakdowns, animal flesh (i.e., “meat”) is quality graded, as are some restaurants, depending on the city in which one lives. But this information is largely provided to allow individual consumers to make more informed choices as to the type and quality of the food they intend to purchase. Nowhere on most supermarket items and restaurant menus is there information provided as to the costs that others must bear for the food products themselves to be produced, distributed, and ultimately consumed or wasted.