What does the cow mean to you? Hamburger? Sacred animal? Pet? Anand Ramayya, a young Indo-Canadian filmmaker, explores the meaning of the humble cow in different cultures in his documentary Mad Cow Sacred Cow. Mad Cow Sacred Cow is his personal journey, revealing the deep connections between the mad cow crisis, farm crisis and global food crisis. We caught up with Anand to ask him a few questions about his new film.
Please describe Mad Cow Sacred Cow to us.
Mad Cow Sacred Cow is my response to the mad cow crisis in Canada; I go on a cross-cultural, intercontinental personal journey to find out how the mad cow and the sacred cow came to exist. I just started to question a lot of things; mainly the food I was eating and it opened the door to this journey and a lot more than just food. In the film I ultimately end up exploring the symbolism of the Mad Cow and Sacred Cow and how interconnected they are to our relationship with the environment, culture, agriculture and the food we eat.
Why did you make the film?
I had just come back from working on a documentary in India where I had reconnected to my Indian heritage in a profound way for the first time. The trip also made me realize that I was completely in love and ready to settle down with a wonderful Canadian farm girl who is now my wife. A month later I found myself feeding her parents cattle, I was pre-occupied with thoughts of India, and the mad cow crisis was all over the news. Farmers were going bankrupt, the public was in a state of hysteria over the controversy and for the first time I was questioning the safety of my food, specifically my beloved burgers.
I started doing research into how my food was being produced and came across one of my wife’s books called Stolen Harvest written by Dr. Vandana Shiva and in it was a chapter called Mad Cows and Sacred Cows. That chapter provided the framework for a 4-year investigation into food, culture, agriculture, the environment and cows that would result in Mad Cow Sacred Cow.
Along the way a lot of things happened that continued to inspire the journey, my in-laws announced they were going to slowly sell off the farm and get out of agriculture, the mad cow crisis continued to sporadically rear its ugly head and the word “crisis” would soon be common in our media. Food crisis, agriculture crisis, economic crisis, energy crisis, environmental crisis. In my personal life, Teresa and I married and became parents to a baby boy named Owen, heightening not only my sense of fear but also my sense of purpose to make this film. We started shooting the day Owen was born.
Please describe what you saw making this film.
Wow big question, I saw a lot, it was a real eye opening experience for me, at times educational, at times disgusting, at times sobering, at times just so in your face ironic and often very very sad. At the core of this physical journey we traveled from the rolling prairies of my wife’s childhood in southern Saskatchewan where my in-laws and their family had farmed for generations all the way back to my ancestral homeland of Andhra Pradesh, Southern India.
In India I again found myself in the countryside on farms and in the fields of people who grow our food. The cow was central and present on the farms and fields of both countries and I guess I saw how connected cultural is to food and how growing food connects us to the environment that sustains us. It was all about seeing the interconnections and also seeing so many parallels between Canada and India. Some of them I had expected to see but so many things were a surprise.
What have you learned from making the film?
That we need to respect the things that keep us alive, food, air, water, culture. I think that juxtaposing the Sacred Cow and the Mad Cow really allowed me to explore my parent’s Hindu culture, my in-laws’ farm culture and modern culture, to show how even across continents we humans developed so many similar ideas about how to live within our environments but how so much of that wisdom is being ignored in modern times.
Simple things like don’t pollute your water, don’t poison your food, you’d think would be common sense but apparently not in our modern cultural context. Food, culture, ecology are all connected and it is disastrous when we ignore this interdependence. It seems like it should be common sense but I learned that it is not. Culture is a sophisticated thing, its organic, it evolves within its environment and things like respecting the sacred cow, or being a steward of the land, are revered for practical reasons.
What are you hoping the audience will take away?
I wanted to make this film about big issues but its also very personal and if the people who watch the film can have a personal experience that helps them think about how their own lives are connected to food, culture, the environment then we’ll have done something worthwhile.
I’m trying to make some small changes in my life, like eating less meat, supporting local, organic and sustainable farmers, driving less and walking more, that kind of thing. I’m hoping the story of Mad Cow Sacred Cow can connect with other normal like-minded people who just want to try and live more sustainably.
Why do you think different cultures view the same creature so differently?
I think it speaks to a profound difference in attitudes towards the relationship between “nature” and humankind. Some people think the rest of creation is for humankind to utilize as it sees fit and some people believe in a more reciprocal relationship. It’s a huge question, but ironically, and unfortunately, I felt that in many ways all of our respective cultures have been overshadowed by the dominant consumer culture, its really homogenizing attitudes so I found the same things that happen in North America perpetuating themselves in India, the land of the sacred cow.
Knowing both worlds how do you view the cow?
I would like to quote Dr. Vandana Shiva to answer this question “I think the financial indicators are not the true indicators of how well a society is doing, and I think we need new indicators, how are your cows doing are they well or are they mad? A mad cow society with 20% growth is still a mad cow society growing faster and faster in its madness!” Symbols are powerful things and I believe the cow is a powerful symbol that has a place in modern society, perhaps as a symbol of sustainability.
What does a culture that views the cow as sacred think of factory farms?
I can’t speak to what an entire culture views but from what I experienced and the people I met, those who truly viewed the cow as sacred and recognized its ecological role, the idea of factory farms would be inconceivable. I know a lot of people who don’t consider the cow to be sacred and the factory farm is inconceivable even to them. The cow is at the center of an agriculture system that keeps people alive, 2 head of cattle and one acre of land in India was, and could be, enough to sustain a family. That’s a life sustaining system with cows at its centre; in that type of culture I would think adoration and respect would be more appropriate than exploitation.
How would you categorize the film? Animal rights film? Food film?
It’s definitely not an animal rights film; we didn’t have enough time to go into that huge issue, though I hope it could be a springboard for discussion on living with a sense of interdependence with nature.
I think it is a film about the connections between food, the environment, culture, society and globalization. There is a bit of social commentary in there. I’d love to hear what you or your readers think.
How long did it take you to make the film?
Production officially started in February 2007 and continued off and on until July of 2008. The entire process took much longer, researching the story, finding our subjects in Canada and India, financing, shooting and editing took 4-5 years.
Is Mad Cow Sacred Cow the film you set out to make?
It’s not actually the same film I originally planned to make, I had originally imagined a film more focused on globalization, the mad cow crisis, and it did not have me as a character. Over time, through the development process and even in production I discovered new things at every turn that kept changing the film. The most startling discovery for me was the global farm crisis and the striking parallels between small farmers in Canada and India. That hit home and made this film more personal for me.
Visit: http://www.karmafilm.ca/mad-cow-sacred-cow/
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written by Saffo , July 01, 2011