Thom Yorke tells Animal Aid's Eat This! why he gave up meat

Thom Yorke is interviewed in Eat This!, a film about the meat industry from the campaign group Animal Aid, out for National Vegetarian Week, which begins today. Animal Aid, who call him a private man who picks his causes with care, say it is the first time he has talked about being a vegetarian on camera.

He gives three reasons he stopped eating meat: The Smiths' “Meat Is Murder”, getting ill every time he ate it, and a girlfriend he wanted to impress, so he pretended he had always been vegetarian. People warned him he would miss something in his diet and fall ill. The opposite happened, he says; he felt better and healthier straight away and never looked back. Why the hell would you still wanna eat meat?²

The film follows four teenagers (two meat-eaters, a vegetarian and a vegan) as they take a video camera to farmers, supermarkets and experts. Alan, the vegan, is thrown out of a supermarket, and Matt tries to get into a chicken farm. The MTV presenter Tim Kash hosts, with undercover footage from factory farms, and, according to Animal Aid's announcement, the rapper Common, also a vegetarian, appears. Animal Aid give it away on VHS or DVD and are sending it to schools with a booklet of student activities; clips of the Yorke interview are on the film's website.

In the rest of the interview Yorke talks about the big supermarket chains, which he dislikes, antibiotics in meat and the animals reared in factory farms. Asked whether teenagers should care about factory farming, he says yes, they should care that society deems it necessary to create this level of suffering in order for them to eat food that they don't need².