Charles Burnett
1978
75 minutes
This is a very "atmospheric" film about African-Americans living in Watts, shot in black and white in the 1970s. The main character is a guy who works in a slaughterhouse, which doesn't look glamorous. There are a decent amount of meat scenes, but not like PETA propaganda levels or anything.
You've been a meat-eater your whole life, but you've dated plenty of vegetarians and vegans who fortunately were never preachy about your own dietary habits. Your belated wife, who was a vegetarian since she was a teenager, cooked you a lot of delicious vegetarian food. You'd sometimes supplement this with some meat you cooked yourself, but more often you would just have what she was having. She would consider this a subtle moral victory, one less carnivore having a meat-based dish for dinner that night.
Sometimes you don't have to convince someone to act the "right" way every time, but just often enough for it to make a bit of a difference. Plus she taught you to cook vegetarian meals for yourself and to appreciate them enough to want to do so. You still will cook tofu for yourself or have seasoned lentils instead of ground beef in meals, so her influence has lingered for years since she's been gone.
On the other hand, you did slightly corrupt her a bit by moving her to Baltimore. Shortly after moving to the east coast from the midwest, she discovered the remarkable fact that oysters are, in fact, a vegetable. Soon afterwards she found that mussels are a vegetable as well, especially when accompanied by a rich risotto. Clams soon followed, and once you introduced her to the miracles of anchovy paste, she started occasionally using this ingredient in pasta sauces herself--but only in paste form. You even got her to tolerate canned anchovies as a sauce ingredient, but only if they were mashed beyond recognition.
Overall her influence on you was a net positive over your corruption of her. You still find yourself accidentally going for several days at a time without consuming any meat. You're a little bit proud of this whenever you realize it, even if you're not trying.
Time to choose something different: