My Year of Meats

Product Information

Corea, G. (1985). The mother machine: Reproductive technologies from artificial insemination to artificial wombs. New York: Harper & Row.

Jane Smiley described My Year of Meats as a “comical-satirical-farcical-epical-tragical-romantical” novel. Beginning with quotations from Sel Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, peppered with faxes and memos, and ending with a documentary-like description of a slaughterhouse, your novel does indeed seamlessly combine several different genres. Is this how you originally envisioned the narrative, or, as you began writing, did the story and characters simply begin to outgrow a straight, linear structure? Ozeki clearly points out in the author's note that this is a work of fiction, but it feels very much like the truth, complete with bibliography and footnotes. Issues of hormones, fertility, abuse, agriculture and culture all come to the forefront, but Ozeki resists the urge to preach. I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterises the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.” The story also sheds light on the link between diet and fertility, particularly in the case of the “mad cow disease” or BSE (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy) of the 90’s, whose outbreak effected meat consumption in the UK, US and Japan. During the late 80’s, a case of BSE was confirmed in the UK, a new disease found in cattle. Fear that this could be transmitted to humans in the form of Vcjd (a slow-degenerative disease), consumption of specific offal was banned and 3.7 million cattle were destroyed. Despite these precautions, human cases were eventually identified and found to be the causes of death. Eventually, media attention dissipated and the supposed threat of the disease disappeared. Now, over two decades later, can we confirm that our attention to meat consumption has changed?The effects of DES and hormonal drugs go further than pregnant women. Despite being illegal in the use of meat production, they are still popular among factory farmers. Cheap meat is often riddled with these hormones, and those in poverty who can afford nothing else suffer the consequences, such as heightened levels of estrogen and expedited puberty. These effects can be seen in some minority families Takagi-Little features on My American Wife! Ruth Ozeki writes with such precision and honesty that I found myself walking alongside her main character Jane Tagaki-Little, completely immersed in the story rather than viewing it objectively. I had to keep reminding myself that this was Ozeki's first novel, because it's so fully formed and well-written. Gatens, M. (2013). Imaginary bodies: Ethics, power and corporeality. London and New York: Routledge. Romance, agri-business, self-discovery, cross-cultural misunderstanding—it takes a talent like Ruth Ozeki’s to blend all these ingredients beautifully together. My Year of Meats is a sensitive and compelling portrait of two modern women.”

Honestly, this book is very strange. It reads like a memoir, definitely not like fiction. I *thought* it was a memoir good two-thirds into it. There are so many scientific details, included so mechanically, that it made me think I was reading a long, occasionally poetic, occasionally over-the-top dramatic reportage. It was interesting, okay, but confusing. John and Bunny’s five-year-old daughter who is the most badly affected by the synthetic hormones they use for the cattle. She has been so poisoned by growth hormones that at a mere five years old her body has matured into that of a grown woman. Update this section! Then, out of nowhere, the book becomes a poor man's The Jungle, only with more jerks. The character Dave appears completely from thin air, and his entire purpose is to spout paragraph upon paragraph of stuff that seems lifted from "Food, Inc". It's very much like how The Jungle devolves entirely into a socialist manifesto by the end, only a lot less interesting. The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. Reading this book is one way to give yourself the incentive to become vegetarian. It's a novel, but if you can believe that it's based on actual conditions that occur in the meat industry you will feel nausea every time you walk past the meat department in the grocery store.

Jane Takagi-Little is a Japanese-American documentary filmmaker who is hired to work for a Japanese production company, where she uncovers some unsavory truths about love, fertility, and a dangerous hormone called DES. The company works with BEEF-EX to promote the use of American beef in Japan by creating a Japanese television show called My American Wife!. [2] At the end of the novel, Jane says, “I don’t think I can change my future simply by writing a happy ending. That’s too easy and not so interesting. I will certainly do my best to imagine one, but in reality I will just have to wait and see.” For the most part, the characters in My Year of Meats do, in the end, get what they want, what they need, or in the case of John Ueno, what they deserve. Will you elaborate on why you decided to write a happy ending? Ozeki takes this novel from sharp-witted and playful to emotional and honest seamlessly. Her writing shines in the descriptions of each of the families Jane profiles, adding layers of richness to the main story. I was not fully aware of the “issues” or “causes” until the first marketing meeting for the book, so no, I was not concerned that it would become a “novel of causes.” My characters live in their world, a universe, parallel to ours, where serious “issues” may constitute the meat and the gristle of their lives, but they do not identify their problems as “causes,” and neither did I.

While it does depict many realities of American factory farming, the focus is firmly more on its human impact than on its animal one. Being someone very sensitive to depictions of animal cruelty and death, especially for meat consumption, there are some difficult scenes to read through, but not enough that they're this book's main takeaway. I appreciate that the animal scenes aren't scarring, but I'm afraid they wouldn't do enough to instill empathy for meat animals into the uninitiated. I started out loving this book. The voice was moving, and it seemed like a love letter to everything I adore about the American Heartland. I was fascinated by the commentary on authenticity - with ourselves, with physical commodities such as meat, and with others. I also absolutely loved the excerpts from The Pillow Book and all of its simple profoundness. I'm definitely going to put it on my to-read list. I also was moved by Akiko's plight and found her story interesting. I know, this sounds like My Year of Meats might be one of these books written by militant vegetarian out on a crusade, but it is actually a pretty well researched documentary about issues in cattle ranching and the meat industry in general of that particular time. In the early-morning hours, wrapped in a blanket and huddled over her computer keyboard, Jane writes a pitch for the new program: “Meat is the Message. . . .It’s the meat (not the Mrs.) who’s the star of our show! She must be attractive, appetizing, and all-American. She is the Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest.” And so Jane, a self-described polyracial prototype, embarks on her year of meats, zigzagging across the country in search of healthy American wives. Throughout the novel the theme of trust and betrayal of that trust are found in several characters and situations. Jane pitches a show featuring "typical all-American families" to the network and they come to expect white Anglo-Saxon protestant families gleefully devouring red meat. Instead they get shown "the real America" that is to say culturally and ethnically diverse, and not a nation of beef-eaters. The betrayal of trust is also prevalent in John and Akiko's marriage. John frequents strip clubs as he finds himself more sexually stimulated by buxom American women. The biggest betrayal of trust however is that of Beef-Ex and the American public. The company is genuinely unconcerned by the harm that their tainted meat can cause. Moreover, despite knowing the harm it can cause they continue to promote their products and even push for increased consumption abroad. Update this section!To avoid government oversight regarding what hormones cattle can be treated with, an American beef manufacturer begins selling their product in Japan, where no such regulation is in place. As a culture strongly influenced by Buddhism, however, the Japanese diet contains comparatively little meat. To boost sales, the beef manufacturer develops a reality TV show called My American Wife. Each week, Japanese audiences are introduced to a new American family, with the wife demonstrating how to cook a meat-laden dish. Consider Jane and Sloan’s relationship. It seems that the same qualities that make Jane successful in her career—strength and control—become obstacles in developing an intimate relationship with Sloan. Have you encountered this problem in your own relationships? At any point did you find yourself impatient with Jane or Sloan? Were you surprised to see them together in the end? Do you think that the novel is optimistic about intimacy? Are you? Chapter 2 begins with this quote from The Pillow Book: “ When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home, faithfully serving their husbands, women who have not a single exciting prospect in life yet who believe they are happy, I am filled with scorn.” Akiko and Jane, as well as the women featured on My American Wife!, reflect the different roles women play both in Japan and within America. Of all of the women featured in the novel, with whom did you most identify? Were there any that you upheld as models for what women should aspire to be? The story of meat (beef) production which also threads through the book is also real. One doesn’t have to accept this from a fictional work. The facts have been reported news multiple times as concerns about “Mad Cow Disease”, the early onset of puberty (via sex hormone exposure), and the effects of growth hormone on children periodically come to the surface of the 24-hour news cycle. Time for a spoiler or two…

Wonderfully wild and bracing . . . A feast that leaves you hungry for whatever Ozeki cooks up next.” some people on here found the book preachy. i can't for the life of me see any preachiness in it, but at the same time i do see, somehow, how one might feel preached at by it. eh. if you feel preached at just drop this book and read something else. ruth ozeki won't mind. she didn't write the book for you. As the author, I wrote a happy ending, although, like Jane, I am suspicious of the efficacy of doing so. But happy endings satisfy the emotions, and I wanted to provide that type of satisfying narrative closure in the hope that it would free the intellect to continue its trajectory beyond the story line, pondering the issues the book raises.Coming at us like this — in waves, massed and unbreachable—knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment—becomes bad knowledge—so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness. . . . In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence.