as forced to dutifully prepare each recipe featured on the show, and then fill out a focus group questionnaire about it rating such categories as "Educational Value, Authenicity, Deliciousness of Meat, and Wholesomeness".
With heavy irony Ozeki makes Akiko bulimic. But between her runs to the bathroom to throw up these supposedly delicious meals, she becomes intrigued with the lifestyles of some of the people appearing on the show. After watching the vegetarian Lesbians hold forth, she writes a letter to Jane saying that she does want to live with a man like her husband, and asks guidance. After ending up in a hospital after still another beating from her husband John, she is befriended by a nurse named Tomoko, who gives her refuge, and she plots her eventual escape to America.
Meanwhile Jane has miscarried after a horrible accident on the killing floor of the slaughterhouse where she went determined to film the abuses of the meat-packing industry. But she gets enough incriminating footage to show the world the horrible practices (hidden by the meat industry with the connivance of the media) that produce the shrink-wrapped pieces of innocuous looking beef that we routinely select for our barbecues. In the book's final chapters she skewers the meat industry's greed, and shows how it has damaged the lives of many people, including Akiko and herself (she holds the DES hormone that her mother took for fertility before Jane's birth responsible for her miscarriage, which is now routinely fed to beef).
A few more observations about the book before we expand our scope into a consideration of the meat industry as it exists today not in fiction, but in real life.
Writing is transparent, and 100% self-revealing. After the techniques and craft are nailed down comes the moment of truth for one who aspires to write. Any pretensions or affectations, the smarmy desire to charm the reader, self-congratulatory di
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