My Year of Meats

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Jane storyline runs concurrent to that of another Japanese woman, a former horror mangaka, Ueno Akiko. Akiko is unhappily married to Ueno “ John” Joichi, the Japanese director of “ My American Wife!” John is an abusive husband who is obsessed with Akiko conceiving. Thinking that somehow by cooking the recipes featured in the show Akiko would be able to bear children he forces her to watch and evaluate episode after episode of “ My American Wife!” demanding that she have the highlighted viand prepared for him by the time he gets home. In the process of watching the show however, Akiko’s sense of self grows and with it a growing sense of independence, straining the already troubled relationship between her and John. To my fellow Asian Americans… we really have to do better than this. Not to center my feelings, though I’ll just say it’s frankly embarrassing to me that this book exists. 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.

It sounds coherent now but it wasn’t. It’s certainly not something I planned to do in advance. I’d describe the process as organic, with one part growing willy-nilly out of another.

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The juxtaposition of first-person and third-person narrative voices is another transgression of sorts. As a former documentary filmmaker, this question of voice and point of view is interesting on several levels, not the least of which is the effect of extreme subjectivity on notions of absolute or objective truth. Of course, this is a topic that Jane discusses quite overtly in the novel, and that forms its thematic underpinnings.

My mother had two children myself (a boy) and my sister without any problems, but a third pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage. So, for her fourth pregnancy she took DES and thus, my youngest sister is a DES baby. This means that she has the uterine and cervical issues commonly found in DES females and so far she seems to have missed the later-life risks of cancer, but we won’t know until it happens or she dies of old age. Thanks to the rise of social media, health has now become something to be celebrated, questioned and investigated. More attention has been placed on British grown food, organic farming and veganism and consumers have started to ask questions. My Year of Meatsasks us to transfer these concerns to meat. Much like Jane’s housewives who toil over adorning and decorating their meat to produce an appetising meal, the same attention needs to be placed on the care of cattle. How are they kept? What is their diet like? How are they slaughtered? If we are becoming a fast-paced, no-nonsense and lethargic society, then so is our food and our attention to it.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 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. A cross-cultural tale of two women brought together by the intersections of television and industrial agriculture, fertility and motherhood, life and love—the breakout hit by the celebrated author of A Tale for the Time Being and The Book of Form and Emptiness 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.

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 I don’t know what took me so long to read another novel by Ruth Ozeki after A Tale for the Time Being, one of my favorite books of 2013. This is nearly as fresh, vibrant and strange. Set in 1991, it focuses on the making of a Japanese documentary series, My American Wife, sponsored by a beef marketing firm. Japanese American filmmaker Jane Takagi-Little is tasked with finding all-American families and capturing their daily lives – and best meat recipes. The traditional values and virtues of her two countries are in stark contrast, as are Main Street/Ye Olde America and the burgeoning Walmart culture. Upon Jane's discharge from the hospital, Jane’s former colleagues reach out to her informing her that they had made copies of her footage of both the horrible conditions at the farm as well as the infected children. Jane makes a documentary from the salvaged footage, which is then circulated by the family of the hormone-poisoned kids. The revelation of the Beef-Ex feedlot operations sparks a great public outcry and Jane’s documentary sells to hundreds of media outlets. Having vindicated herself Jane then reconnects and reconciles with Sloan and together move forward to a brighter future. Update this section! Wonderfully wild and bracing . . . A feast that leaves you hungry for whatever Ozeki cooks up next.” it seems as if what i'm about to say could be said of all of ozeki's novels, but this is mainly a story of women, and since ozeki is nothing if not a fierce woman writer, she gets into the nitty gritty of femalehood -- sex, the body, mothers, children, wives, blood, guts, food, work, love, resilience, and the bond of honesty that must (imperatively must) link women everywhere -- from the get go, and stays there, right in there, in that space of womanhood that is so often undervalued and dismissed, the whole time, even when the going gets tough and malehood threatens to encroach and take over.

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I almost gave this book two stars. I think My Year of Meats contains some interesting commentary about the production and marketing of meat on a global level. It also highlights the cruelty of patriarchal abuse and violence.

Maybe it’s because I’m like Jane, racially halved and “neither here nor there,” but I’ve always been suspicious of binary oppositions—comedy and tragedy, documentary and drama, fact and fiction—so I guess it makes sense that I’d write a transgressive, genre-bending novel. It’s an outgrowth of my independent film work, too. I’ve made two movies, Body of Correspondence and Halving the Bones. The first is a drama with documentary aspirations, and the second is a documentary with fictional lapses. Both rely heavily on montage in their construction, something you can see in My Year of Meats, in the use of faxes, memos, quotations from newspapers, from eighth-century Japanese court diaries. So, she and her team set out on a journey across America to find the perfect participants for the show. Soon enough, Jane's disenchantment with the "beef is best" message of the show brings out her creative streak and instead of pleasing the producer's bigoted expectations of what a typical American family is, she sets out to put a dose of reality into "reality tv". But, putting all of that aside, I am very glad that I did read this novel. I found the story and most of the characters to be “real”. There are a couple of major characters that were not as fleshed out as the others. Not a complaint, just an observation.In My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki does not presume to have the answer to this question, nor does she attempt to shepherd readers through the rough terrain of love and happiness at the cusp of the millennium. Rather, she invites them to revel in the fumbling, imperfect—yet endearing—qualities of human nature. Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 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.