My Year of Meats

My Year of Meats by Japanese-American writer and documentary filmmaker Ruth Ozeki is an uneven book that at its best (when describing conditions in a slaughterhouse) is absolutely gripping, and at its worse (when being self-consciously and ingratiatingly clever) is scarcely worth reading.

The book chronicles a year in the life of Jane Takagi-Little, who - surprise - is also a Japanese-American documentary filmmaker. Sitting at home one night in the East Village of New York City in the midst of a blizzard she gets a phone call offering her work coordinating production on a Japanese TV show sponsored by BEEF-X, a US lobby group for the meat industry looking to expand their sales in the Japanese market. The show, called My American Wife!, features carefully selected American housewives cooking their favorite beef recipes, which Japanese homemakers in the target audience are encouraged to emulate in their own kitchens.

Taking over responsibility for producing the show after the departure of the Japanese director, Takagi-Little eventually comes to loggerheads with the conservative Japanese executives controlling the purse strings by ignoring their stereotyped selection criteria for choosing subjects for the telecast, and picking quirky, off-beat, eccentric people whom she finds both more authentic and more interesting. Instead of travelling the Midwest to interview "representative Americans" fitting an Ozzy-and-Harriet stereotype which meet the show's requireme

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of the overriding importance of the subject matter to humanity. She has more than a touch of the latter quality when she addresses the evils of the meat industry, but it keeps popping in and out of focus. To be fair, let's compare her with someone who tackled the same subject (and stuck to it without sidetracks into sexual orientation, gender politics, domestic violence, infertility, and infidelity) and handled it better. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in the early years of the 20th century few people were aware of the origins of the meat they ate. The industry itself, which he referred to as the Beef Trust (www.gutenberg.org) dominated producers, employees, and consumers with unaccountable hubris, producing enormous profits for the "pirates" at the top, maintaining horrible working conditions in its slaughterhouses, fixing the price of beef in every region of the country, driving small butchers out of business, often bringing tainted and unsafe meat to the tables of America, and paying off, ruining, or corrupting any politicians with the temerity to investigate industry conditions. Here are some excerpts to give a flavour of the book, written from the point of view of Jurgis, an employee in the meat industry in the U

Category: Film - M