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‘my year of meats’, ruth ozeki

The first time I read a Ruth Ozeki book - A Tale for the Time Being - I holed up in my windowless hotel room in Bogor, ordered room service and didn’t leave until I finished it. Went out to buy malaria pills, came back, shut the door and read parts of it again, feeling the room’s pink walls closing in on me. I couldn’t put down My Year of Meats either, both for Ozeki’s writing - the kind that makes you sweep the pages, impatient for what happens next - and also for how it seemed to be putting a full stop to the year for me. It could be confirmation bias, but so many themes emerged in the book that have become important to me this year: Documentary-making and one’s obligation to truthfulness and entertainment (or whether there is one), communication, agriculture, where our food comes from, corporate responsibility, and being divided or different and yet similar or unified. Thank you Providence !! 

My Year of Meats is, briefly, about a Japanese-American documentarian (didn’t know this was a word) who is hired to produce (and later direct) a Japanese documentary/reality programme set in America, ‘My American Wife’. Sponsored by a beef company called BEEF EX, the show is meant to portray wholesome, happy, full-busted, family-friendly American Wives cooking Delicious Meats - particularly beef and pork - in a way that appeals to Japanese Sensibilities. In other words, a clever but thinly veiled meat promotion TV series. Ozeki then uses her daring, ever-moving protagonist to dig up the book’s controversy: there’s something very insidious about the meat industry that they’re promoting, and dangerous about the meat that they and many wives across Japan are cooking and eating. The book is also heavy on the Japanese-American cultural divide and the protagonist’s own struggle to bridge it, and how it permeates other aspects of her life. I think cross-cultural confusion is sufficiently universal that double-barrelling is a ‘fill in the blanks’ kind of situation; I felt the book very relatable in thinking about my own experiences with multiculturalism, both within and outside of myself.

True to its title, ‘My Year of Meats’ then deftly becomes a kind of investigation into the highly questionable practices and systems that underlie (have underlain?) meat production, such as the use of abortion drugs and growth hormones and feed recycling. I call it deft because the parts of the book that could very easily have been preachy and environmenty were very seamlessly written into the story. The only slightly clunky plot device was an oddly knowledgeable and fired up van driver who conveniently fed the protagonist a lot of ~facts about meat production~ during a particularly long drive..haha. But who am I to comment on the kind of knowledge that a van driver in Texas should possess. Other themes emerged to add complexity, such as the need to produce beef cheaply to keep up in the market and the pressures it puts on the farmer (sIMple REProDUCtion SQUeeZe w0w are you proud of me YNC) - I was disappointed that this wasn’t brought out more, but it’s not Ozeki’s job to write social commentary on agrarian production. So whatever I’ll just go read more Henry Bernstein or something (wow how pretentious). She does all this without the book becoming a *documentary*, retaining the thrill of a bona fide fiction. The story is invented but many of the meat-related anecdotes aren’t - they’re taken from factual accounts of health and environmental scares from beef production. That’s what makes this book so clever, it’s a fiction yet not a falsehood. And really admirable, when you consider the amount of research that must have gone into it. 

After finishing the book I was pretty curious about some of the health scandals she referred to. This part may be a bit of a spoiler, but other than the sources she cited, there are others that lend credence to her story:

https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/veterinary-drug-residues-in-foodanimal-products-its-risk-factors-andpotential-effects-on-public-health-2157-7579-1000285.php?aid=66580

https://munchies.vice.com/en_uk/article/3d459w/this-is-your-cheeseburger-on-drugs

(and of course good old Wikipedia, also I guess a spoiler if you are big on Not Knowing the Names of Drugs Mentioned in Books Before Reading Them) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol

Of course, the caveat is that the book was published in 1998, and set in the mid 1990s. Many of the controversies alluded to have blown over and we are probably facing a pretty different meat industry today... or are we ??? Jeng jeng. How would a similar book look like today and what kind of research would you need to write it well? 

In any case, what a gorgeous book, and something I’m very grateful to round off the year with. And I leave you with a quote that I think summed up much of what moved me about it:

"I had started my year as a documentarian. I wanted to tell the truth, to effect change, to make a difference. And up to a point, I had succeeded: I got a small but critical piece of information about the corruption of meats in America out to the world, and possibly even saved a little girl's life in the process. And maybe that is the most important part of the story, but the truth is so much more complex.

I am haunted by all the things - big things and little things, Splendid Things and Squalid Things - that threaten to slip through the cracks, untold, out of history."

Happy New Year and may next year be another one for the books :) 

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It’s a lot harder to be discreet making the Sunday morning “walk of shame” when you are still dressed as a zombie.

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friends + quiet + rain

also:

1) kiwis

2) milo

3) coconut milkshake! 

:) 

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i’m sinking back into one of those, free time depressive rut things, imagine you’re walking along the road and encounter a comfortable looking pit and then... that’s it, you just sit in the pit and sleep. that was me this weekend.

maybe it will help to think of good things:

1. i’ve been pretty diligently doing my 3-times-a-week exercise thing. have been shaking it up here and there and trying things from cardio to HIIT to boxing and what not, but i’ve been meeting my 3x target decently well and it’s taken discipline.

2. i’ve made myself get out of the house and Do Things more than I would have before

3. i’ve been late for work maybe 3 times in 3odd months. here’s to 0 in the coming 3 months? 

4. I’ve been cooking a lot and packing my own food with decent frequency. still have some kinks in portioning to work out but I’ll get there! 

5. I have a fixed monthly saving and have been doing okay with the spending to match that

6. people seem to like me all right at work

7. I’ve been working hard and I think I’m still on the upward swing i.e. not on top of my game yet but I will keep pushing myself to improve where I know I need to and stay humble and diligent 

8. Have been going to church almost every week

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Saint Sebastian (detail) - Carlo Dolci

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By Anke Grunow

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the boy… is he dead?

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someone caption this

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Today’s design-adapted flower is the arrowhead, an aquatic wildflower that blooms in late summer in Ohio.  From Eugène Grasset’s La plante et ses applications ornementales,1897-9.

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I am Lonely and sometimes feel like a small wave in a big sea 

I really enjoy my morning walks to the mrt station, there is a beautiful breeze and I am alone and don’t use my phone

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I am having one of the warmest of nights. I heated up my kimchi stew from yesterday and Chris and Shark were right, it is even more delicious the next day, maybe because the flavours from the kimchi soak in a bit. Egg is also essential, and so is fish, and I’ll put in the gochujang at the end and add sugar next time. Some things are made with meat and they are delicious because of the years of care and craftsmanship that went into them. Don’t forget it.

I came home early and took a shower, ate pocky and talked to my dad on the phone, heated up my dinner and ate it, now I’m listening to Yuna and writing on Tumblr and I was and will later be reading a book. Don’t lose what you have by forgetting that you have it. 

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@copperbadge