Running it with a room

Before you press play

1. 1Sit them in foursTables of four argue. Tables of six have a quiet person in them. If numbers are awkward, make one table of three rather than one of six.
2. 2Open a roomOn the film's opening screen, choose Open a room. Set how many tables you have. A six-character code appears — put it on the screen, or write it on the board.
3. 3Everyone joinsThey go to poshpork.com/join on their phone and type the code. No app, no account, no sign-up. They pick a name and a table. Give it two minutes.
4. 4Play the filmWhen a question comes up it appears on every phone at the same moment, and the film pauses. Each table answers once, so they have to agree. Anyone at the table can put the answer in — or change it — and everyone at that table sees who did.
5. 5Watch the barYour screen shows the answers arriving: four of six tables, five of six. When the room is in, press continue. That is the only button you need to touch all session.
6. 6The verdictAt the end, every person votes individually on each of the four suspects. Then the tables are ranked. Leave that on the screen — it is where the argument usually starts.

Practicalities

Length

1 hour 23 minutes, plus roughly 10 minutes of pauses for the questions. Allow two hours with discussion.

Age

Suits a general audience from around fourteen. Younger groups follow the story; the argument lands better with older ones.

Room

One screen, and a device you control it from. Sound matters more than screen size — the film is dialogue-led.

Wifi

Phones need a connection. If it drops mid-question the phone reconnects on its own; nothing is lost. If the venue wifi is bad, use the show-of-hands mode.

Breaking it up

It breaks cleanly into four parts — three of about seventeen minutes, then the trial, which runs thirty-three. Note the time when you stop so you can resume.

The four parts

It divides into four sections, each of which stands on its own. The first three run about seventeen minutes; the trial itself runs thirty-three, and begins the moment the judge enters at fifty minutes.

1. 1What food is, and what happened to it0 to 17 minutesThe charge. Protein, fat, what the body needs and cannot make, and what changed when food began to be manufactured. The groundwork for everything after it.Health, Family & Consumer Sciences, Biology
2. 2How we got here17 to 33 minutesEvolution, cooking, what the fossil and isotope record shows about early diets, the agricultural transition, and the argument that food shaped which countries industrialised first.World History, Anthropology, Geography, Economics
3. 3Who decided, and how33 to 50 minutesDietary guidelines, how the advice reversed, engineered appetite, marketing to children, and the difference between correlation and cause. The section on evidence itself.Statistics, Media Literacy, Government & Civics, Psychology
4. 4Inside the body50 to 83 minutesThe trial proper. The mechanism traced through the bloodstream — lipids, oxidation, energy production — and then the verdict, which the room delivers. Twice the length of the others.Chemistry, Biology, English & Debate

Three single periods and one double, two double periods, or the whole thing in one sitting. The verdict only works if they have seen part four, so if you are short of time, that is the one to keep.

What the questions are for

The questions are not a quiz. Most have no right answer, and the ones that do are less interesting than the disagreement they cause.

The point is that people commit before they know. Once a table has said "spreadable" out loud, they are invested — and when the evidence goes the other way twenty minutes later, they notice their own mind changing. That is what a group remembers afterwards, not the facts.

Three ways to use them

Hold the pause. The film waits. If a table is still arguing, let them. The best sessions run long.

Ask the outliers. When one table goes against the room, ask them why before you continue. They usually have a reason, and it is usually the most interesting thirty seconds of the session.

Come back to it. At the verdict, remind them what they said at the start. Ask who changed their mind, and at which piece of evidence.

Afterwards

Questions that work with any group, in roughly increasing difficulty.

• →Which suspect did you find guilty, and what convinced you?
• →Did anyone change their mind during the film? At what point?
• →The film says the suspects have only ever been examined one at a time. Is that a fair criticism, or a convenient one?
• →Who benefits from the confusion about what is healthy?
• →The director is a pig farmer who wants to sell pork. Does that change how you weigh the argument? Should it?
• →What would it take to prove the film's central claim wrong?

Checking the film

Every substantive claim in the film is published at poshpork.com/press, marked as consensus, contested, or the director's own synthesis, with a source for each.

For an older group, that table is the lesson. Give them a claim each and ask them to decide whether the label is right. Several are genuinely arguable, and two are the director's own arguments that have never been peer-reviewed — he says so.

If something goes wrong

A phone won't join

Check the code — the alphabet has no vowels and no O, 0, I or 1, so nothing can be misread as a word. If it still fails, they can share a table-mate's phone; only one answer per table counts anyway.

A phone drops out

It rejoins by itself. The same seat, the same table. They may need to reload the page.

The questions don't appear

Reload the film page. If they still don't, switch to show-of-hands mode and carry on — do not lose the room to a technical problem.

Casting to a TV

Use an HDMI cable rather than casting. Casting sends the video to the television but leaves the questions on the laptop, where nobody can see them.

Anything else — including on the day, mid-session — write to screening@poshpork.com or colin@poshpork.com. It comes straight to the person who made it.