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. 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. In the end, though, it is a tribute to the power of the imagination. You cannot make a better world unless you can imagine it so, and the first step toward change depends on the imagination’s ability to perform this radical act of faith. I guess I see writing as a similar endeavor. Romance, agri-business, self-discovery, cross-cultural misunderstanding—it takes a talent like Ruth Ozeki’s to blend all these ingredients beautifully together. My Year of Meats is a sensitive and compelling portrait of two modern women.” The Union of Concerned Scientists. Hurricanes and climate change. Union of Concerned Scientists: Science for a Healthy Planet and Safer World. Accessed 9 Oct 2019, https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/impacts/hurricanes-and-climate-change.html

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! 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. Our exposure to the media has reached a fever pitch. Increasingly, we are bombarded by instant information via television, print, radio, and the Internet. Is this a positive development? What is your own “screen” for judging information received in the media? Has your reading of My Year of Meats suggested any new possibilities for your own relationship with media sources? World Health Organization (WHO). https://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/food-technology/faq-genetically-modified-food/en/. Accessed 10 Aug 2019 Akiko is so underweight due to her bulimia, stemming from her dismal marriage to an asshole, that she cannot have children. However, her husband is obsessed with passing on his genes. He also enjoys drinking excessively, ogling strippers, and beating up his wife whom he only sees as an incubator for his future child.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). https://www3.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/cafo.pdf. Accessed 15 Sep 2019 Ruth Ozeki is a Canadian-American novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She worked in commercial television and media production for over a decade and made several independent films before turning to writing fiction. In true Ozeki-style, the story is two-fold. We are first introduced to Jane, a Japanese-American documentary filmmaker working in partnership with BEEF-EX, a corporation whose aim is to promote the beauty and health benefits of American meat to Japan. Through the creation of a new TV series, My American Wife!,Jane travels across the country in search of “model housewives” for her Japanese audience. Wives whose concern is no longer ‘old-fashioned consumerism’ but ‘contemporary wholesome values’ like providing ‘good, nourishing food for her entire family. And that means meat.’ When Jane Takagi-Little, an unemployed Japanese-American documentary filmmaker, answers the phone at two in the morning, her life is forever altered. She accepts a job working on My American Wife!, a Japanese television show sponsored by an American national lobby organization that represents American meats of all kinds—beef, pork, lamb, goat, and horse, just to name a few. In the early-morning hours, wrapped in a blanket and huddled over her computer keyboard, Jane writes a pitch for the new program: “Meat is the Message. . . .It’s the meat (not the Mrs.) who’s the star of our show! She must be attractive, appetizing, and all-American. She is the Meat Made Manifest: ample, robust, yet never tough or hard to digest.” And so Jane, a self-described polyracial prototype, embarks on her year of meats, zigzagging across the country in search of healthy American wives.

In desperation, she faxes Jane in secret divulging not only how unhappy she is but also detailing the abuses she receives from him. Unfortunately John discovers the fax and proceeds to physically beat Akiko then rapes her afterwards. She is hospitalized as a result of the beating and it is here that she learns that she has finally gotten pregnant. Jane’s episode featuring the vegetarian lesbians has inspired Akiko sufficiently however to finally decide to leave John once and for all. She leaves him while he is away on another business trip, fleeing to America where she befriends Jane and meets up with the families featured in “ My American Wife!” who have made the greatest impact on her.

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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. Weird, huh? How someone just drops into your life like that. I mean, there we were, minding our own business. . . . What did we do to deserve her?” 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. Jane sees herself as a "documentarian" and her aspiration is, on one hand, to record the times she lives in like the Japanese writer Shōnagon, and on the other to inspire someone by the results of her work. Lara and Dyann are a lesbian couple living with their children in Massachusetts; ironically, the pair also happens to be vegetarians--making them the most incongruous contenders for concept of “My American Wife!” Featuring the couple however produces to be the most authentic, most heartfelt, episode that Jane had produced. It is the warmth and authenticity of their relationship inspires Akiko to leave Joichi and seek out her own happiness. Bunny

The anti-meat section of this book fell a bit flat. You settle in and get comfortable with the book, which seems to be about two women. Suddenly you're reading a fiction book posing as a non-fiction book about the hazards of eating red meat and the evils of the beef industry. A bit heavy handed. I like a good non-fiction book, but when placed in a novel, it loses all credibility. The novelist isn't an expert with credibility, despite her moderate research. Plus, the delivery of the message through a conveniently one-sided evil character felt biased. It doesn't matter whether or not I agree with the message; this wasn't the place for a term paper. No, seriously. There is a lot of stereotyping, and this is what spoiled my enjoyment of this book. I don’t mind vegan or vegetarian agenda, I think it’s very valid and important, I don’t eat meat myself. Vegan proselytizing, bring it on, baby. But the bad and ugly here is the totally untrue, stereotypical, overwrought caricature of Japan and Japanese. Akiko is too stupid to live, her husband is the most hateful, despicable portrait of a Japanese salaryman that has been ever painted using exclusively bile and spit, and the Japanese society is a group of evil automatons. Poor Akiko can only find happiness running away to the beautiful land of America, where random people will feed and house her for free. Through split narratives, we meet Jane Takagi-Little, a Japanese American documentarian, and Akiko Ueno, a Japanese housewife. Jane is hired by Akiko's husband and his business (Beef-Ex) to direct and produce reality / cooking shows about American meats for a Japanese audience.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 Another family that Jane meets at the annual hog festival in Askew, Louisiana, and another one of her more successful attempts at featuring non-traditional families, Vern is a chef and Grace is a mother of twelve kid--ten of the twelve are Korean children that they’ve adopted. Joichi particularly resents Jane for featuring the Beaudrouxs as it is the husband that does the cooking rather than the wife. Christina Bukowsky