Can you look an animal in the eye and continue to eat meat? This tremendously weird documentary made the answer brazenly clear

Last night’s Channel 4 documentary Meat the Family operated on a simple enough premise: a meat-eating family must care for a farm animal for three weeks before deciding whether to kill it or not. And, for three quarters of its duration, it went exactly as you’d expect. But then, my god, the whole thing turned into a goddamn Michael Haneke movie.

We’ll get to that part soon. Timed cleverly to coincide with Veganuary, Meat the Family was essentially a reminder that ignorance is bliss. We were introduced to two families whose consumption of meat was both gleeful and excessive, then watched as they were forced to look after some of the animals they enjoyed devouring so much. One received a pair of pigs, the other three chickens. The question, ultimately, was this: can you look an animal in the eye and continue to eat meat?

Immediately, the answer was yes. In a brazen act of defiance, both families greeted their new additions by instantly eating some of their species. Pig Dad’s first act was to cook some roast pork. Chicken Mum watched as her chicks – named Clucky, Jennifer and Hayley – were installed in her garden then requested a Nando’s. What this says about the pathology of humans doesn’t bear thinking about.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Shall we get a Nando’s?’ ... Meat the Family. Photograph: Channel 4

Then, as the families began to bond with their new pets, they were educated about the animals themselves. The chicken family visited a comically sinister Dutch megafarm, where chicks are stacked up on a multistorey conveyor belt in a warehouse for 41 days before being gassed and electrocuted without ever getting to experience the sensation of sunlight.

The pig family had it slightly easier, because they just got to learn that pigs are quite clever. They went to Berlin, where they watched a pig put pennies into a money box. “You can’t watch a pig do tricks and then go and eat a pork dinner”, said Pig Mum sadly afterwards. Her son, meanwhile, changed his mind about eating meat when he learned that pigs were smart enough to play video games. Pigs, he decided, were much more intelligent than dogs. He looked over at his own pet dog Hugo. “Hugo’s thick!” he shouted, in what I took as a clear intention to cook and eat Hugo at the earliest opportunity.

At this point, Meat the Family still made some degree of sense. It was just another show where people had their minds changed by new experiences, like Wife Swap or White Kid, Brown Kid or even Undercover Boss. But then came the denouement: after caring for them for almost a month, would chicken family choose to send their new pets to slaughter?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Pig Dad’s first act was to cook some roast pork’ ... John and Dawn in Meat the Family. Photograph: Channel 4

Turns out yes. Yes they would. “We’re still hellbent on eating meat”, said Chicken Dad, as his children giggled nervously in agreement. And then everything got tremendously weird very quickly.

Soundtracked by a twee plinky-plonk score, we saw the children carry the chickens from their garden to a van that whisked them off to be murdered. And then, in a twist I probably should have seen coming a mile away, the plucked and packaged corpses of the animals were returned to the family, so they could eat them on camera in front of everyone.

Honestly, not since the last 20 minutes of Midsommar have I seen anything as creepy as this. Chicken Dad brought in a box containing three supermarket-ready chickens. One of the children pulled one of the chickens from the box, crying and weeping and calling it by its name as she forlornly cradled its cadaver.

But then the dad cooked it anyway, and served it up on a bed of roast potatoes so they could dig in. Immediately, everyone became much happier about their decision. “Is it Hayley?” the girl asked with a mouthful of pet. “Because Hayley didn’t like any of us.”

And that, it seems, is the moral of Meat the Family. Modern farming practises are cruel and brutal, and it’s important to remember that animals are living creatures with rich inner lives. But it’s still OK to eat them, so long as you can be reasonably sure they weren’t into you either.