My Year of Meats

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All of these characters are embedded in the terrain of America—and the text of the novel—like unique jewels. Each is different, yet none is less captivating than another. And as Jane, much to the chagrin of the Japanese production company, detonates stereotypes by incorporating these quirky, unforgettable characters into My American Wife!, a central theme of the novel begins to crystallize—that of authenticity. I really enjoyed My Year of Meats. When a book sets out to be challenging but still remains a form of intelligent discourse, full of colourful wit and empathy, what's not to like? And when the book does all of this without trying to manipulate an opinion or drawing at your hear strings to evoke a response - yes, looking at you here J.S. Froer - perfect! 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. Another family that Jane meets at the annual hog festival in Askew, Louisiana, and another one of her more successful attempts at featuring non-traditional families, Vern is a chef and Grace is a mother of twelve kid--ten of the twelve are Korean children that they’ve adopted. Joichi particularly resents Jane for featuring the Beaudrouxs as it is the husband that does the cooking rather than the wife. Christina Bukowsky Ruth Ozeki is a Canadian-American novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She worked in commercial television and media production for over a decade and made several independent films before turning to writing fiction.

A migrant family who Jane features on the show as an attempt to be more inclusive to other ethnicities within the US, the Martinez’s emigrated to Texas so that their son could be born an American citizen and have access to good education and opportunities they never had in their home country. Vern and Grace Beaudroux 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. Because the show is sponsored by the beef industry, it needs to have a central focus on foods - and predominantly, the consumption of quality meat. An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

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Jane Takagi-Little is a Japanese-American aspiring documentarian from MN, desperately in need of a job when she's given the chance to produce My American Wife. While the show wants to repeatedly portray families reflecting an American stereotype (straight white parents with straight white kids), Jane prefers to capture the country's diversity. As she interviews families from all across the country to showcase, she begins to see a pattern of detrimental effects from the very product she must sell, meat. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). https://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/. Accessed 1 Nov 2019 Corea, G. (1985). The mother machine: Reproductive technologies from artificial insemination to artificial wombs. New York: Harper & Row.

Given the alternating viewpoints, the mix of verse and prose, the author's tendency to switch from first person to third person and a jumble of faxes thrown in, this could have been a hot mess of a book. Instead, it's a work of art. 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! I’m working on another novel. I used to talk about new projects but I’ve stopped doing that because until you choose to make them public, they are very private things. Are “authentic” American wives really the “ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest” middle-class white Americans that Beef-Ex wants to offer up to the Japanese TV audience? Ruth Ozeki paints a world where wives are “meat made manifest,” where, according to the Beef-Ex hierarchy of meats, “pork is possible but beef is best,” and with this type of metaphorical play, she deftly yet relentlessly teases out our own preconceptions and misconceptions about culture, gender, and race. 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?

Ozeki has directed and produced a large number of documentary-format programs for network television. Her first independent narrative film, Body of Correspondence, was the winner in the New Visions category at the 1995 San Francisco Film and Video Festival, was screened at the Sundance Festival and on PBS. Her second independent and first feature-length film, Halving the Bones, traced her mother’s Japanese roots and offered an exotic portrait, partly factual and partly speculative, of her maternal grandparents and their lives in Hawaii. The film aired at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the 1996 Asian American Film Festival in San Francisco, the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, and many other venues, as well as being shown on PBS. 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! So my initial impulse was purely anecdotal; the novel’s primary theme, that we live in a world where culture is commerce and where global miscommunication is mediated by commercial television, grew from the very specific escapades of the narrator, Jane. The meat was metaphorical, a gag, if you will. As Jane and her crew embarked on a road trip to make a cooking show featuring rural American housewives (I’d done a similar kind of show myself and found it rich in narrative episode), meat took on a variety of metaphorical resonance: I was thinking of women as cows; wives as chattel (a word related to cattle); and the body as meat, fleshy, sexual, the irreducible element of human identity. I was thinking, too, of television as a meat market, and Jane as a cultural pimp, pandering the physical image of American housewives to satisfy the appetites of the Japanese TV consumers. And thus Beef-Ex was born as the sponsor of Jane’s TV show. There are two very distinct parallels between yourself and Jane—you’re both filmmakers and you’re both of mixed heritage. Do the similarities stop there? How about Akiko? What part of her character did you relate to the most? Determined to learn more, Jane visits Dunn & Son, Custom Cattle Feeders, where she meets the family: Bunny, a former stripper and rodeo queen; her elderly husband, John, who proposed to Bunny during a lap dance; Gale, his “pale, flaccid” son from a previous marriage; and John and Bunny’s five-year-old daughter, Rose.

The main character Jane Takagi-Little is tasked with directing a reality TV show for Japanese television and her brief has basically two features: 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? Murasaki may not have liked her much, but I admire Shōnagon, listmaker and leaver of presumptuous scatterings. She inspired me to become a documentarian, to speak men’s Japanese, to be different. She is why I chose to make TV. I wanted to think that some girl would watch my shows in Japan, now or maybe even a thousand years from now, and be inspired and learn something real about America. Like I did." Early in the novel, Jane says, “All over the world, native species are migrating, if not disappearing, and in the next millennium the idea of an indigenous person or plant or culture will just seem quaint.” Do you believe that this is true? If so, do you perceive it as a step toward a more peaceful, accepting world, or as a step away from a diverse, well-textured world? Is it possible to maintain cultural diversity without prejudice?If you look at any of the widely available summaries, you’ll know that the book concerns a pair of women whose lives interact via a pseudo-documentary-episodic-commercial TV program, My American Wife. Although filmed in the United States, the program is created for and produced by a Japanese advertising agency for broadcast within Japan. Since there is a considerable difference in the two cultures, the book uses the inevitable misunderstandings and opposing sensibilities as one of its strengths. Having experienced both cultures (if ever so briefly during my trips to Japan), I can attest to the “trueness” of these observations. But, don’t rely on me; the author herself is the living embodiment of both cultures. Of course, no discussion of My Year of Meats would be complete without a word about food safety and the use of hormones in the meat industry. We learn that ninety-five percent of American cattle are routinely fed “growth-enhancing” drugs, and that trace residues of these drugs, as well as herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides, end up in the beef that we eat. This information is as integral to the plot as it is to Jane’s well-being, and here the story unfolds like an industrial thriller as these larger social issues start to dovetail and resonate with the most intimate parts of the women’s lives. In precise and luminous prose, Ozeki captures both the sweep and detail of our shared humanity. The result is gripping, fearless, inspiring and true.”