My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki is an enjoyable read which will also provide you with plenty of food for thought.

Brilliantly written, not least because of the way Ozeki blends the various strands of the novel together. Its heroine is the Japanese-American Jane Takagi-Little. We first meet Jane, unemployed, on her uppers and desperate to become a documentary film maker, when she accepts a job as the co-ordinator for a TV series that is trying to flog American meat to the Japanese

As the story unfolds, Ozeki looks at culture, race, relationships and the pernicious way that big business influences our lives. In the process you also gain a much better understanding as to why the EU doesn’t allow the import of American meat into Europe.

Jane proves to be the perfect observer. As a Japanese-American, Jane is never entirely accepted by either camp as ‘one of them’ while, at the same time, her unique position enables her to look at things both as an outsider and an insider. In addition, having lived both in America and Japan, Jane is acutely aware that both countries are ‘floundering in a miasma of misinformation about culture and race’.

A culture so different from our own, Ozeki is only able to give us a snapshot of some of the differences between Japanese and Western culture. Perhaps what is more surprising is the way Ozeki reveals how our idea of ‘Western culture’, and, in particular, ‘American culture’ is often a myth, even at its most clichéd level: cows and cowboys introduced into the States by the Spanish.

Ozeki also points out how different cultures can view the same thing from diametrically different viewpoints: no more so than with the kudzu plant. Regarded as a prized crop by the Japanese film crew, but seen an out-of-control weed by the Americans, a metaphor for Japanese industry’s inroads into America.

There is also the question of how others regard a different country’s culture. For instance, Akiko’s view of America is so skewered from what she has watched on TV that she is shocked to discover there are poor people in America.  Ozeki reflects too on how the dominance of one particular culture can engender feelings of self-loathing among people from other cultures. Joichi Ueno is a prime example: a Japanese businessman who insists on being called John; he too has a skewered view of what is American or who should be thought of as American (white, straight and above all a carnivore). He even becomes angry with his wife, Akiko, when she makes Japanese dishes instead of the American ones his TV shows promote.

And what is American culture? For Suzuki it seems to be ‘Jack Daniel’s, Wal-Mart and American hard-core pornography’ whereas Wal-Mart appears to be for the average Japanese viewer a fantastic example of American capitalism at play. However, it is these same Wal-Mart stores that have destroyed what was once the bedrock of small town America – family-run businesses. As a result, one small town in America looks exactly the same as every other one. Main Street, as it once was, is no more, and driving down it are Americans in Nissans and Mazdas rather than American-made Barracudas or Impalas of yesteryear.

As one of the TV participants Gracie points out ‘Sometimes you had to look at things from another angle‘. Thus viewing America from the standpoint of her Japanese colleagues, Jane acquires a better insight into the anomalies of her own country such as the violence embedded within its core. In fact, Jane soon realises that filming in ‘these bastions of small-town culture; what I learned is that there’s precious little culture left, and what’s managed to survive is mostly of the “Ye Olde” variety’. Add to that, the difficult history of America’s past whose traces are still visible not only within society itself but in the statues of Rebel soldiers in Southern towns or the renovated slave cabins on Grace and Vern’s plantation.

As an Asian-American, Jane has her own specific crosses to bear whether it’s being mistaken for a Mexican terrorist(!), or having a Japanese mother who is racist towards black people despite her own unique position as the only Asian in town; or the assumption by fellow Americans that as an Asian-American she’s bound to be ‘reliable, loyal, smart but non-threatening‘.

Jane’s Japanese counterpart is Akiko, manipulated into a marriage by her boss (does that really happen in Japan?) to Joichi/John. A victim of domestic abuse and bulimic, she is unable to menstruate and have the child that ‘John’ has decided they now should have.  Akiko is alone and friendless. Nevertheless, she finally finds the courage to make a new life for herself in America, partly inspired by the very shows Jane has made.

As the novel progresses the downside of factory farming becomes ever more apparent. The first sign that something is wrong is when Oda has a seizure due to the build-up of antibiotics in the meat he’s eating. As the doctor points out the animals live in such dirty and overcrowded conditions, they are only kept alive with massive doses of drugs.

Later on we learn that growth-hormones in meat are feminizing men: hormones such as the man-made oestrogen, DES, banned in chickens but thanks to political lobbying allowed to be used in the rearing of beef for years afterwards. In doing so, it turned cattle farming into an industrialised process, reaping huge profits if causing impotence and infertility among those who farmed them while destroying smaller farms, unable to compete, in its wake.

As Jane learns more about the meat industry she feels compelled to tell the truth even if it means getting fired from a job she desperately needs to keep. Having already established the causal link between the use of drugs and hormones in rearing meat and reproductive disorders, illnesses and other harmful side effects, Jane comes face to face with what a feedlot farm and slaughterhouse are really like. Not only vile for the animals that have the misfortune to live and die there but also disastrous in its repercussions for those who work there, symbolised by the grotesque body of the child, Rose. It seems anything goes in the name of increasing the profit margin, no more so than when Gale justifies feeding the cattle paper, cardboard, by-products from their own slaughterhouse and even their own shit.

As Jane admits we all know there is something wrong with factory farming, but we choose to ignore the facts as a coping mechanism. It’s easier than dealing with the facts, and Ozeki manages to include a lot of facts on factory farming within the novel without it ever coming across as a polemic. It’s a neat trick to pull off, helped in no small measure, by an engaging storyline, peopled with an assortment of American and Japanese characters. Her take on culture is fascinating. No more so than when it comes to the culture clash between what someone like Joichi regards as ‘American’ culture and the more diverse American reality, encompassing the likes of Miss Helen and the Harmony Baptist Church, the multi-racial lesbian couple Lara and Dyan and the Mexican immigrants, Alberto and Catalina Martinez to Jane herself. My Year of Meats gives you an insight into a culture so different from ours while exposing how little we know about our own. It may also make you think twice when it comes to ordering your next steak!

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