A good way to convert carnivores to vegetarians: show them a real-life pig farm. Or you could settle for a documentary, one that really shows the cruelty and suffering of a slaughterhouse. But maybe that sounds boring, and instead, you just want to watch a good action movie on Netflix.

Maybe some viewers didn’t know what they were getting into when they streamed director Bong Joon-ho's Okja, a terrific movie about a young Korean girl (Mija) and her adorable CGI “super-pig” (Okja). Sci-fi is often a backdoor way to reinterpret and explore real-life issues, but Okja's messages hit more on-the-snout than most. In this case, that's probably a good thing. The movie’s message? Eat less meat.

But I couldn’t help but wonder: Did Okja inspire anyone to actually change their diet?

For some, the narrative detachment separating Okja from, say, a documentary, helped the cause, if anything. For some, it served as a jumping-off-point for their own study of the ethics of meat-eating. “I’m seeing more of my friends move away from red meat due to health and environmental issues,” said filmmaker Tom Park, who has been a vegetarian since the release of Okja. "It led me to do a lot of quite saddening research into intensive farming. It was like a dark twisted Pixar film. The finale is such a horror story of the families being torn apart and the living conditions of the pigs."

Annie McCarthy, a 23-year-old designer, rediscovered her lapsed vegetarianism after being reminded of what inspired her in the first place, despite the challenges. “I've stuck with it since [the end of the movie]. About a week out, I went to my favorite phở place out of habit and I noticed they didn't have any meat-free dishes. I realized being vegetarian was going to be a lot harder than I remembered.“

Jon Ronson, a writer who co-penned the movie with Bong Joon-ho, told me he himself has been approached by people whose lifestyles changed after seeing Okja. “Oh, [there were] so many people. So many stories. I remember getting an email right before the film came out saying, ‘There are people all around the world who don't realize they're about to become vegetarians.’ I read that google searches for "vegan" went up 58 percent (it was 65) after Okja. I have no fucking idea if they carried on that lifestyle, but the impact is definitely there.”

So, why this movie? Why Okja and not documentaries like Food, Inc. or Jonathan Safran Foer’s vegan manifesto Eating Animals? The auteurist, conflicted self-inspection of Bong Joon-ho helped, never presenting a moral imperative one way or the other. He extended that courtesy to his cast, too. Paul Dano, the leader of the fictional Animal Liberation Front (ALF, no relation) in the film, spoke to GQ about his complicated relationship with eating meat last year, and Ronson, himself a vegetarian (with the occasional foray into seafood), simply says it never came up. “For his part, Bong never asked me what my eating habits were, but I think it was appropriate that I don’t eat meat.”

"It was really powerful, informed, and humanizing storytelling on the part of Bong Joon-ho," said Abbey White, a 26-year-old pop culture and food writer, who, post-Okja, found it very difficult to switch to a herbivore lifestyle, given her distaste for “vegetables that weren’t dripping in sauce or had the taste steamed out of them.”