- I would never go hunting.
There's no way that I would ever go hunting.
(gunshots drown out speaker)
Oh my God dude, this is a lot.
- This is like heaven.
Look at all this.
- My name is Merle and I'm a vegan.
I'm vegan for environmental reasons,
but I'm also a pretty hard core animal lover.
I was in Montreal and there were these people,
they're called anonymous and they were screening
factory footage in like a town square
and I caught myself just staring at the TV
and someone came up to me and was like
hey, if you're interested at all,
try going vegan for 30 days.
And so I did.
And I felt really good and after that,
I was just like I think I'm done.
I don't think I wanna be handcuffed to anybody for 24 hours
let alone a person that I've never met.
And knowing you guys, I feel like this is gonna be
a hard core person that comes in
wearing pigskin or something.
I'm nervous.
- Hello.
How's it going?
I'm Kelsey Rose.
- Merle.
- Nice to meet you.
My name is Kelsey Rose.
I started eating meat because I grew up in Tokyo
and so we ate a lot of fish
and a lot of chicken there.
But I also do hunt.
I'm a big hunter.
I've grown up hunting with my dad.
After you have finished your hunt,
you have to field dress all the animals,
which means that you need to basically remove the meat
from the rest of the animal.
When you field dress a dove, you start with the head
and you tear the head off
and then you go to the wings and you tear 'em out
and there's like a snap
so you know that they've been removed out
and then with your fingers,
you go into the breastbone and you basically
rip it apart and then you have your breast meat.
- [Producer] Merle, are you prepared to do that?
- No.
No I'm not prepared to do that!
I don't wanna do that!
I mean, it's cool that you do that.
I have no, no desire to do that.
(beeping)
- Let's do it.
- [Woman In Gray shirt] So here you go.
- I don't even know how to work handcuffs.
- I think that's a good..
(music drowns out speaker)
- [Merle] My hands are sweaty
- This is going great.
- [Merle] Okay, I think we're in.
- Yeah girl!
- [Merle] Even when you're handcuffed, LA traffic sucks.
- [Kelsey] Always.
- [Merle] Maybe especially.
(laughing)
- So yummy.
All right, so we're gonna talk to the butcher
and see what came in fresh today
and what we wanna make for dinner.
We're gonna see where all the magic happens guys.
- Oh my God dude this is a lot.
- [Kelsey] Oh yeah!
- I'm seriously gonna gag.
Oh my God, I can't.
They're tattooed.
- I'm so proud of you for doing that.
That was awesome.
I'll go into a garden with you.
- Yeah, that seems like a fair trade off.
- Knowing where your meat comes from
and getting it from a store that does kill them humanely
and uses all parts of the animal is super important to me.
- I just have to say.
The phrase "killed humanely"
is a little bit of an oxymoron.
- Yes.
But if you are gonna kill an animal,
kill it the most humanely.
- Okay, there we go.
We can settle on that.
In exchange for going to the butchery,
we are now going to get the ingredients
for what I'm gonna make for dinner
at an artisanal mainstream grocery store.
- All right here we go, it's your food section.
- Okay great.
My safe space.
(classical music drowns out talking)
Hello again.
So we went for our grocery run.
Got a (beep) ton of mushrooms and basically all vegetables.
There's just so many potatoes.
- My question really is how she's gonna feed me with
nutritional yeast seasoning.
- This is the cheese sauce.
Quote, end quote, cheese sauce
for the vegan mac and cheese.
Let me just say, I would not make this for myself every day.
This is a lot of effort.
- It looks like we're eating food from the famine.
(blender running)
- There we go.
We've reached the meat portion.
- So here we go.
My moment to shine.
I like to smear it in duck fat.
This might look really gross to some people.
Look at that.
- [Merle] How do they get duck fat?
- [Kelsey] I don't think you really want to know.
- I'm vegan, I know this is gonna piss a lot of people off,
but the meat looks good.
(Kelsey laughing)
- So instead of making this,
which is beautiful thick cut bacon,
we're making this.
- [Merle] Damn skippy we are.
- It could be bacon.
It smells really good and I love mushrooms
so I'm excited to try it.
It's really difficult to eat in handcuffs,
so I'm just gonna do this.
They're really yummy.
I'm very impressed.
They do have like a bacon texture.
- [Merle] They kind of have the fat from the shitake.
- It totally like,
and there's a good crunch to it.
I've learned a new recipe today
and I will say, even though this mac and cheese
has taken hours, it is really good.
(suspenseful music)
This is horrifying and so sad at the same time.
- [Male On Computer] They are still struggling
as they are dunked upside down in tanks of steaming water.
- Why would you beat a pig if you're already gonna kill it.
These people have sadistic points of view
because I think if everybody, if they wanted to eat meat,
had to go hunt their own meat,
a lot of people probably wouldn't eat meat.
But because we've created an industry where they
literally factory farm and they plump 'em up
with steroids and stuff like that, you know what I mean.
- [Male On Computer] Suspended on a bleed rail
and immersed in scalding tanks to remove their gristle.
- Also, one thing I'll say is
I didn't stop eating meat because I don't like meat.
I love meat.
It's not something I did because I was like
I think I'll just, this is an easy thing to do,
I'll stop eating this thing I love.
But for me, it's just my choice, right.
I can still desire meat occasionally.
I used to fucking love steak.
I used to eat lobster.
I love that shit, but this is more important to me,
so that's why I stopped.
- This is gross.
I'm really glad we ate dinner before we watched this.
- Yeah, I know.
There's kind of an art to this.
No there's not, it's chaos.
- And we have a super fun day planned for tomorrow
that's both half vegan, half meat eater so
- Whatever that means.
- We're at a shooting range
and we're gonna soot some skeet today.
Pull.
(gunshot)
- [Merle] I think the camera's making you better.
Okay, now that we're un-handcuffed I can be honest.
I'm wearing the hat, feeling, acting really confident,
but in reality I am absolutely terrified to be
shooting a gun right now.
I don't like guns.
I don't like the kick back.
I'm nervous that I'm not gonna hit anything
and I'm completely and totally out of my comfort zone,
but I'm just gonna do it.
- [Kelsey] Look at my little girl.
My little vegan.
She looks pretty natural, I'm not gonna lie.
- [Instructor] Slide it forward
- [Kelsey] And now it's loaded.
So don't pull the trigger.
- [Merle] Pull.
(gunshot)
God, this thing is crazy.
(instructor laughing)
(Kelsey grunting)
- [Kelsey] So proud of her.
- Pull it back, right.
- What do you think?
- I have gotta admit, that was so (beep) fun.
I'm all fired up right now
and I will probably do this again.
- And she kicked butt.
You got a lot.
- I actually hit more than one
so I'm feeling pretty good about myself right now.
I'm about to do a cartwheel or something, once I put
the gun down of course. Not with the gun.
- I'm really proud because it's nice to have
another badass woman to come do this with.
- Women holdin' it down out in the field.
What do you call this thing?
Range. The range.
- Yeah!
All right, ready for another round?
- No.
I think my cheek needs a rest.
- So my girl Merle has been so open minded
and I'm so happy because not a lot of vegans,
not a lot of people, would be down
to go to a shooting range.
And we're not hunting but
oh my God, she made it, yes!
But she is kicking butt and I appreciate
going through this process with someone who's open minded
and who's down to kinda see how I live my life
as I am open to see how she lives hers.
So I'm pretty stoked.
It's been a really good day.
I kinda don't want this 24 hours to end.
Maybe we can hang out not handcuffed.
Just a suggestion.
- Wow, wow, wow.
What a crazy 24 hours it has been.
I think the biggest surprise was that
Kelsey and I actually had much more in common
than we ever thought we would.
Even though she's a meat eater,
even though she's a hunter
and after the challenge I have no interest
in becoming a hunter or eating meat again.
I will say that she did show me a way of consuming meat
that I think was more responsible and more honest.
The fact that she hunts her own meat
and she sees the thing that dies for her
and she sees it up close and she cleans it herself
and does the whole thing,
I actually have respect for that.
And even though it's not how I choose to eat
and I don't necessarily think that
that might be a sustainable model
for everyone to consume meat,
I do think it's something for more people to consider
and at the end of the day, she's completely right.
She knows where her meat comes from.
She goes out of her way to spend a little more to eat meat
that's healthy and eat meat that ideally
has had a better life.
So our common enemy is factory farming
and even though we have two totally different ways
of confronting it, I'd say that we're both doing our part
in one way or another.
(upbeat music)