MY YEAR OF MEATS: BOOK REVIEW
CW: INFERTILITY & MISCARRIAGE, ABUSE, R*PE, EATING DISORDERS, & ANIMAL CRUELTY
In Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, the reader is drawn in by complex characters who undergo experiences such as world travel, escaping a country, and even being battered by cow carcasses in a slaughterhouse. While devouring the book, I found it difficult to connect each intricately detailed theme. In hindsight, I have tried to map everything together, and found that not only is Ozeki an incredible writer for her portrayal of the complicated connections between race, nationality, gender, sexuality, meat eating, and more, but she is brilliant for condensing them into one beautifully written, gorgeously crafted three hundred and sixty-one page novel.
I’ve mentioned plenty of concepts already, and though they all intersect, not many are willing to suffer the headache that connecting them involves. However, Ozeki saves those privileged enough to ignore this the trouble. Told through the eyes of protagonists Jane Takagi-Little and Akiko Ueno, Ozeki takes the reader on a discovery of the meat industry’s evils in two countries across the globe: the United States and Japan.
Let’s begin simply. Jane Takagi-Little begins her work with Japanese television network BEEF-EX slowly. She quickly adapts to her role as director of the network’s TV show My American Wife!, a reality series where different American families and meat-based dishes are featured weekly. Takagi-Little is a Japanese-American androgynous woman who struggles with infertility and complications at work, as cultural disconnects often leave her frustrated, unheard, and without the ability to provide media representation to minority communities. BEEF-EX’s policies for the “American wives” featured on the show are simple. They must be attractive, middle or upper class, and most importantly, white.
During her time as director, Takagi-Little successfully irritates her boss, Joichi Ueno, by featuring Mexican-American and queer families as well as attempting to film a black family. In conversation with her romantic partner Sloan Rankin, Takagi-Little tells him of BEEF-EX, “[they] don’t want their meat to have a synergistic association with deformities. Like race.” During her time at BEEF-EX, Takagi-Little suffers racism, sexual abuse, and pregnancy complications, all while realizing the dark truths of the American meat industry.
Akiko Ueno, wife of Joichi, views the episodes of My American Wife! in a way that is culturally opposite compared to Takagi-Little’s viewing. Japan, in the past, had not been as fond of meat-eating as the U.S., as it was viewed as unclean. Joichi, who actively whitewashes himself by going by the name “John” and idolizing the English language and his proficiency in it, sees this view of meat as irrational and intends to use My American Wife! to encourage more Japanese families to see the greatness of meat. Over the course of the novel, Ueno’s husband forces her to rate each episode of My American Wife! by categories such as authenticity and believability and cook each week’s featured meal. If anything goes wrong, she suffers abuse at the hands of Joichi. After watching an episode where Takagi-Little features a queer family with two mothers, Ueno becomes intrigued by the concept of lesbianism and began to question her own sexuality.
Like Takagi-Little, Ueno deals with infertility and pregnancy issues. Throughout her marriage to Joichi, she suffers from anorexia and occasional bulimia when forced to eat meat by her husband. This causes her to be severely underweight and infertile.
Yes, this is a lot. And yes, it does all connect.
So far, I’ve mentioned everything from the discovery of one’s sexuality to cross-cultural disconnect. What connects all of these concepts in My Year of Meats?Takagi-Little and Ueno’s parallel pregnancies and previous struggle with infertility. All of the issues discussed in the novel culminate in the protagonists’ experiences with reproduction, which in turn connects with nonhuman animals’ experience with it.
About halfway through the book, Takagi-Little discovers the effects of diethylstilbestrol (DES), a plant-based hormone administered to farm animals and, previously, pregnant women. The effects of DES on pregnant women are detrimental to their children, who can suffer from deformities at birth and cancer. Takagi-Little’s mother was administered DES during her pregnancy, resulting in Takagi-Little’s uterus being deformed and described as being in the shape of a bull. This connection between Takagi-Little’s pregnancy and nonhuman animals is not the first, as she notices the parallels between slaughtered cows, their aborted fetuses, and her own child’s ultimate fate.
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!
As meat becomes a large part of Ueno’s life following the premier of My American Wife!, we begin to see connections to her pregnancy and the meat industry. Ozeki describes Ueno’s nausea after consuming meat as animalistic in the same way that Takagi-Little’s uterus is. Following Ueno’s arrival to America, she is able to experience her first Thanksgiving. Ueno is finally able to consume meat without the consequence of nausea, signifying that distance from her abuser had been the cure to her ills.
With the novel’s conclusion, the reader is left wondering if Ozeki had intended to write a positive spin on meat in its conclusion. I don’t believe this is the case. Ueno and Takagi-Little both suffered infertility at the hands of an evil industry which has been the main perpetrator in the abuse of not only farm animals but humans as well. To say that their pregnancies were somehow empowering to them in the end, despite their discoveries both personal and universal, is narrow minded. In her essay "Strange Coupling": Vegan Ecofeminismand Queer Ecologies in Theory and in Practice: CHAPTER 3: A Vegan Ecofeminist Queer Ecological Reading of Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats, Adriana Jiminez Rodrigues writes, “...cows and women are exactly the same as absent referents for reproductive bodies to be exploited and profit from,” and I find this to be the exact case for bodies of color as well as queer bodies. Through financial exploitation and manipulation, people are somewhat forced to consume meat that is ultimately detrimental to their health, not to mention the effects the industry has on the nonhuman animals that we consume.
There is no happy ending to Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, as the meat industry and its effects feel rather inescapable. However, there is retribution present in the narrative: freedom from the meat industry is possible, and if one is unable to reach this freedom due to the shackles of finance, health, etc., there are those willing to risk everything to represent them in the hopes to gain them that retribution.
In my reading of Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, I gripped the cover of the novel with angry hands, felt my throat close in panic, and smiled at the accomplishments of the protagonists and their allies. While Ozeki’s style of writing does not leave much breathing room for those easily triggered by these subjects, I do believe the novel to be an important learning experience for those who can stomach the wrongs done to these characters and farmanimals. In her use of fictional timelines and characters, Ozeki succeeds in implementing the realities of not only the meat industry, but a wide array of prejudices, making our reading of the novel uncomfortable but eye opening all the same.