Movie Review: The Cove

My husband and I sat down to watch The Cove this evening not knowing quite what to expect aside from the fact that it beat out Food, Inc. in winning Best Documentary at the Oscars last week.

I was so moved by the film that I was compelled to come to you and blog about it.  The movie itself is about uncovering one of Japan's most hidden dolphin secrets.  In this cove in Taiji, Japan, 23,000 dolphins are slaughtered from September till March.  Ric O'Barry, the original dolphin trainer on the TV series Flipper became a dolphin activist after his experience on the show and living with the dolphins.  Years after Flipper, his activism has brought him to the pinnacle of his career, the cove in Japan where so many dolphins are senselessly murdered each year.  It is his mission to bring this documentary to the world and for the killings to cease.  It was quite amazing to watch the secret mission unfold, and realize how desperately Japanese officials and fishermen wanted to keep this cove a secret.

What my husband and I found most intriguing was in the special features.  It was an 18-minute documentary about the effect of mercury poisoning called The Cove: Mercury Rising.  It goes into a study done in Japan regarding the mercury levels in tuna and also the thimerosal in modern day vaccinations.

This struck a chord in me as I have two young children and I watch so closely what they put into their bodies.  While I'm not here to argue vaccinations, I did see a correlation between my sons blossoming speech, followed by the MMR vaccination and his subsequent vocal silence.  Now at almost 4 years of age, we are only getting three word phrases and enough physical antics to understand what he's saying for the most part.  While I do not think vaccinations are necessarily "bad," I do think we the public need to be made fully aware about the potential dangers (even though the courts have ruled that thimerosal does not cause autism) and we need to space vaccinations differently. When you watch, The Cove, be sure to also watch this in the special features.

My heart just breaks for this generation, the sickest generation as of yet.  What can we do, how can we change things?  This generation does not need to be ingesting the amounts of soy, HFCS, partially-hydrogenated, ultra-high pasteurized junk they get fed these days.  It is so sad that it has come to this, greed, deception, and lies and as I say nowadays...just follow the money trail.  I do what I can for my family, but I won't lie and say it's easy to gather ingredients and prepare these nourishing meals for my family, to get them to eat food that's not sugary cereal or McDonald's.  It's exhausting at times the more my eyes are opened, I just need to keep my head set on healing my family with real food.  (And I really am truly thankful for the bounty of real nourishing food available year-round in NH!)

I suppose at this point I am just rambling so let me share my top five favorite documentaries in no particular order that have encouraged me in why I do what I do when it comes to our food and lifestyle choices:

• The Future of Food
• Food, Inc.
• The Cove
• Flow (I still want to see Blue Gold: World Water Wars as well)
  
• King Corn

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtfully committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. ~Margaret Mead