My Year of Meats

Ozeki, Ruth L

4.02

19,347 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 0786191988 ISBN 13: 9780786191987

Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks, 2003

A modern-day take on Upton Sinclair's The Jungle With reality, humor, and a message about corporate greed, veteran filmmaker Ruth Ozeki weaves together the story of two women a world apart. Jane, a struggling filmmaker in New York, is given her big break, a chance to travel through the United States to produce a Japanese television program sponsored by an American meat-exporting business. But along the way, she discovers some unsavory truths about love, honor, and a particularly damaging hormone called DES that wreaks havoc with her uterus. Meanwhile, Akiko, a painfully thin Japanese woman struggling with bulimia, is being pressured by her child-craving husband to put some meat on her bones, literally. How Jane's and Akiko's lives intersect in wacky cross-cultural collisions provides romance, humor, intrigue, and even a muckraking message about questionable meat and the homogenization of America. This is the perfect fiction companion to The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.

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Review:

At first glance, a novel that promises to expose the unethical practices of the American meat industry may not be at the top of your reading list, but Ruth Ozeki's debut, My Year of Meats is well worth a second look. Like the author, the novel's protagonist, Jane Takagi-Little, is a Japanese-American documentary filmmaker; like Ozeki, who was once commissioned by a beef lobbying group to make television shows for the Japanese market, Jane is invited to work on a Japanese television show meant to encourage beef consumption via the not-so-subliminal suggestion that prime rib equals a perfect family:

TO: AMERICAN RESEARCH STAFF
FROM: Tokyo Office
DATE: January 5, 1991
RE: My American Wife!...

Here is list of IMPORTANT THINGS for My American Wife!

DESIRABLE THINGS:
1. Attractiveness, wholesomeness, warm personality
2. Delicious meat recipe (NOTE: Pork and other meats is second class meats, so please remember this easy motto: "Pork is Possible, but Beef is Best!")
3. Attractive, docile husband
4. Attractive, obedient children
5. Attractive, wholesome lifestyle
6. Attractive, clean house...

UNDESIRABLE THINGS:
1. Physical imperfections
2. Obesity
3. Squalor
4. Second class peoples

The series, My American Wife!, initally seems like a dream come true for Jane as she criss-crosses the United States filming a different American family each week for her Japanese audience. Naturally, the emphasis is on meat, and Ozeki has fun with out-there recipes such as rump roast in coke and beef fudge; but as Jane becomes more familiar with her subject, she becomes increasingly aware of the beef industry's widespread practice of using synthetic estrogens on their cattle and determines to sabotage the program.

Cut to Tokyo where Akiko Ueno struggles through the dull misery of life with her brutish husband, who happens to be in charge of the show's advertising. After seeing one of Jane's subversive episodes about a vegetarian lesbian couple, Akiko gets in touch and the two women plot to expose the meat industry's hazardous practices. Romance, humor, intrigue, and even a message--My Year of Meats has it all. This is a book that even a vegetarian would love.

About the Author:

Ruth Ozeki is a filmmaker and novelist who has won major awards in both fields. Her first novel, My Year of Meats, won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, the Imus/Barnes & Noble American Book Award, and a Special Jury Prize of the World Cookbook Awards in Versailles. All Over Creation was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the American Book Award, as well as the 2004 WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction. Her award-winning novels have been described as "witty, intelligent, and passionate" by the Independent, and as possessing "shrewd and playful humor, luscious sexiness, and kinetic pizzazz" by the Chicago Tribune. She began her media career as an art director in film, switched to directing television documentaries, and then began making her own films, of which Body of Correspondence won the New Visions Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. A frequent speaker on college and university campuses, she serves on the advisory editorial board of the Asian American Literary Review.

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