Ozeki, Ruth L. My Year of Meats. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.
Like The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair did ninety-two years earlier, My Year of Meats (1998) by Ruth Ozeki highlights the horrors of the American meatpacking industry through a fictional narrative, melding imaginary personal lives with real political issues. The novel begins when a struggling Japanese-American documentary filmmaker, Jane Takagi-Little, accepts a job working on My American Wife!, a television program for a Japanese audience sponsored by BEEF-EX, an American meat lobbying organization. As Jane travels across the United States for the program, she feels compelled to look closely at the meat industry that her work supposedly promotes. What she discovers shocks her: mass-produced meat is often unsafe for those of us who eat it, and especially for the people who produce it. Meanwhile, the wife of one of Jane’s bosses, Akiko, struggles to please her abusive husband by cooking American meat in Japan.
Ozeki frames her narrative around the meat industry, and some of the most dramatic, climactic moments of the novel occur in a slaughterhouse in Colorado, but the novel is not just about meat. Meat is only one shining, particularly apt example of the conspicuous, amoral consumption that has spread everywhere in an increasingly interconnected, homogenous world. The slaughterhouse is a violent, hidden, and dehumanized space, but it is just the capstone to a whole range of overlooked spaces, violent acts, and voracious capitalist practices. Not only do people literally consume hamburgers, Ozeki argues, but they also consume women’s home labor and media-promoted ideals about the “real” American lifestyle and a “good” wife with equal abandon. Even though she does not define herself as a geographer, Ozeki zooms in and out in scale, from international trade to the human body and everything in between, and practically begs her readers to ask, “How are all these spheres connected? Could we ever define where one starts and the other ends?” In this sense, Ozeki does food scholars and geographers a great service. The majority of writing on food justice, and especially geographic theory, is esoteric nonfiction, but with a nonthreatening paperback novel, Ozeki manages to reach a whole new audience. Any food geographer ought to take a look at how Ozeki deftly makes complex scalar relationships seem personal and relevant to a casual reader, because storytelling skills like hers are necessary to gain support for any cause.
Mid-way through the novel, Jane attends a Baptist church in the Deep South for her television program. She observes, “The preacher launched into the body of his sermon, which was about how the world seems so big and strange, but really it’s just made up of countries, which are made up of states, which are made up of towns, which are made up of communities, which are made up of neighbors, which are made up of families, and so on” (112). This is a reassuring approach to scale, and intuitively it seems true: maybe all of the complex connections between people can be arranged into easy to understand groupings, from large to small. In this worldview, groups are related to the spatial distribution of people: families are a smaller scale than a town, for example, because they live closer to each other and share the same space. However, Ozeki takes these neat, concentric circles presented by the preacher, smudges them, and exposes their overlaps. For example, Jane laments that by the turn of the century, “All the local businesses of my childhood had been extirpated by Wal-Mart (…) When it comes to towns, Hope, Alabama, becomes the same as Hope, Wyoming, or, for that matter, Hope, Alaska, and in the end (…) there’s precious little culture left” (56-57). In a global economy, sometimes referred to as “an economy of scale,” towns separated temporally by mountains or an ocean share identical clothes, TV shows, and eating habits. Another part of the global economy, Jane’s production team, is a single community spread out in New York, Japan, and the American heartland, and they stay connected not by physical proximity, but by daily faxes and emails. Jane and Akiko’s relationship is perhaps the most poignant example of spatial separation and personal closeness in the novel. Even though Akiko lives on the other side of the world, she feels most strongly connected to an American woman whom she has never met in her time of need. Ozeki’s point is this: in a global economy that has produced Wal-Mart and the Internet, the scale of human interaction has exploded across huge swaths of physical distance. As a result, a “community” is no longer bound by temporal dimensions (if it ever was), but by something else entirely. As geographer Doreen Massey might say, modern places are defined not by where they are in physical space, but by the routes that connect them (in Akiko and Jane’s case, a TV show, telephone, fax machine, and an airplane) (Jackson 2008).
Ozeki resists a neat, linear view of cause and effect, and she pushes her readers to make non-literal connections between how the men in power control the geography of both women and cattle. When Jane visits cattle country in Colorado, she notes that, “the feedlot looked like an island, an enormous patchwork comprising neatly squared and concentrated beef-to-be” (254). The owner of a cow isolates the animal, restricts its movement to a certain space, and strips it of any identity beyond its usefulness to the person in power. Similarly, Akiko moves between the kitchen, the grocery store, and the bedroom as if she were in a pen. She leaves her place of work when she gets married “to learn to cook and otherwise prepare for motherhood,” because her society does not see her as useful in any other context (37). Just as the meatpacking industry remains on the fringe of rural towns within innocuous buildings to assuage the consumers’ conscience (Fitzgerald 2010), Akiko’s suffering is also intentionally invisible: after John beats and rapes her, he warns her to not leave the house until her wounds heal (201). And, of course, both the cows and Akiko are “stripped, overpowered, and assaulted” (280) in gruesome ways so that the “consumer” of their services can enjoy their flesh. Just as cows do not exist solely to provide us with meat and milk, Ozeki suggests, women do not naturally exist to provide a man with sexual pleasure and domestic labor—this is a myth that geographer Rosie Cox has dismantled (2013). Of course, Akiko is an extreme example meant to prove a point, and the exploitation of women and cattle can be far subtler than outright abuse. As a case in point, Jane is a modern, “liberated” woman—she provides for herself, moves freely about the country, and even breaks gender norms by keeping her hair short. But even Jane is not free from suffering at the hands of this system: like the cows, she has been exposed to the hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES), which caused her to develop a dilapidated uterus in the womb. When an inhumane industry like meatpacking reaches a large enough scale, it can affect not only the food we consume, but also our personal threshold for acceptable exploitation and abuse of any creature. This may seem far-fetched, but a study by Amy Fitzgerald suggests that slaughterhouse employment in a town increases rates of violent crime, rapes, and other sex offenses (2010)—as Ozeki writes, “violence is embedded in our culture” (89). Even the slaughterhouse, as isolated and unnatural as it is, cannot help but bleed into the whole environment.
On some level, Jane really believes that the show My American Wife! is about “people all over the world trying to learn about each other and understand each other” (103). In an optimistic view of globalization, increased connections between continents can lead to greater cross-cultural understanding. But BEEF-EX controls the show, and they want to sell tainted meat in more ways than one. Their version of America has been doctored up, cut into pieces, and disguised in a cellophane package nearly indistinguishable from its original state for Japanese consumption. BEEF-EX executives balk when Jane tries to include non-white, non-traditional families on the show, because “they don’t want their meat to have synergistic associations with deformities. Like race. Or poverty. Or clubfeet.” (57). The Japanese apparently imagine America as a rugged place of abundance and opportunity; Akiko is shocked when she sees poor people in America (310). American lobbyists are the masterminds behind this illusion–as Joichi insists to Jane, he is just a messenger: “The is U.S. sponsor show and U.S. sponsor rule” (155). Americans in power control and subordinate Japan, as Edward Said might put it, by constructing an “imaginative geography” of America (McKinney 2014). Usually characterized by false images of “savage Negroids” and “persuadable yellow men” in the Frye’s Grammar School Geography primer of the 1960s (150), this imaginative geography strangely reverses the typical pattern by narrowly defining the group in power. Global networks of communication might provide an opportunity for cross-cultural understanding, but the meat industry capitalizes on its existing network of resources to do what it does best: cut corners, doctor up, and exploit the less powerful.
If we believe Wendell Berry (1977) that “all corruptions of culture produce breakdowns of morale, of communal integrity, and of personality,” then the corruption of the meatpacking industry can certainly undermine women and swindle a Japanese people, as Ozeki suggests. This “corruption of culture” is particularly widespread in this age of huge scale industry, facilitated by the Internet (a new concept in 1998). Though not quite a geographer in trade, Ozeki introduces unsuspecting readers to geographical concepts, by asking them to ponder how an ever-flowing stream of media and communication has changed our sense of place. Pithy novels may be the best hope for geographers to reach a wide audience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berry, Wendell. “How we grow food reflects our virtues and vices.” The Unsettling of America. Sierra Club Books: 1997. Print.
Cox, Rosie. “House/Work: Home as a Space of Work and Consumption.” Geography Compass 7.12 (2013): 821-31. Web.
Fitzgerald, Amy. “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications.” Human Ecology Review 17 (2010): 58-68. Web.
Jackson, Peter. “Thinking Geographically.” Geography 91.3 (2006): 199-204. Web.
McKinney, Kacy. Lecture on Imaginative Geographies. Author’s personal Notes. Middlebury College. 2014.
I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this assignment. KAC