Celebrity-Packed Series Exposes Evils of the Food Industry

New documentary series Food Exposed with Nelufar Hedayat premiered on the Fusion network last week. Host Nelufar Hedayat—known for her social-justice journalism with the BBC and The Guardian—traveled for 175,000 miles to gather information for the eight-part series and spoke with celebrities such as Nicole Richie, James Cromwell, Jordana Brewster, Moby, Dominic Monaghan, Amy Smart, and Jeremy Irons about their concerns regarding the corruption, environmental destruction, and collusion between governments and large corporations in the global food industry. “The series idea that I had fell in line with all the things I’d already been looking at in my work,” Hedayat told VegNews. The award-winning journalist saw a need to create the show after observing what she said are “large interconnected systems where information disparity, regulations, and law all seem to favor profit and large businesses rather than animals, people, and the planet.” The premiere episode focused on food waste, featured Nicole Richie, and highlighted Hedayat’s journey to Guatemala, where she found people surviving on the waste from Central America’s largest food dump—a result of the West’s rejection of “imperfect” foods. While the series does not wholly promote vegan topics, many episodes focus on the cruel practices and destructive environmental consequences of animal agriculture worldwide, including an upcoming episode entitled “Dairy” in which Hedayat meets with vegan activist/musician Moby and Farm Sanctuary founder Gene Baur to discuss the cruelty inherent in factory farms, the downfall of the dairy industry, and how fast-food chains continue to absorb the excess dairy consumers are no longer buying to feed disease-causing foods back to Americans. New episodes of the eight-part series—the next of which focuses on the fishing industry—air on Fusion on Tuesdays at 8 pm ET/PT.