On this day in vegan history · July 4, 2015
PlantPure Nation Opens on Independence Day
A documentary about a failed Kentucky bill and a plant-based pilot program in a small North Carolina town got a nationwide release timed, on purpose, to the Fourth of July.
The facts
- Release
- Theatrical release the week of July 4, 2015
- Director
- Nelson Campbell
- The bill
- Kentucky House Bill 550, a plant-based nutrition pilot program, failed to pass
- Where the pilot happened instead
- Mebane, North Carolina
PlantPure Nation, directed by Nelson Campbell, opened in theaters the week of July 4, 2015, after a 23-city bus tour of preview screenings that spring. The film traces what happened after Kentucky State Representative Tom Riner tried to pass House Bill 550, which would have funded a two-week whole-food, plant-based nutrition pilot program in Eastern Kentucky. When the bill died, Nelson Campbell took the pilot to Mebane, North Carolina instead, running eating trials there while his father, nutritional scientist T. Colin Campbell, argued the case for a plant-based diet against the industries that profit from the standard American one. Doctors Neal Barnard and Michael Greger also appear, giving the film's case for diet-driven chronic disease reversal added medical weight.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
Our system is about gaining wealth for the few at the expense of the health of the many.
T. Colin Campbell, in the film PlantPure Nation, quoted in HuffPost, April 2015
Source: HuffPost
Why it still matters
The film turned a single failed statehouse bill into a bigger argument: that plant-based nutrition belongs in public policy, not just personal choice, and that the resistance to it is structural, not scientific.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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