Olivia: Okay, Jackson. My Year of Meats. Five-word review. Go. Jackson: Hmm. 'Satirical, heartbreaking, and surprisingly... meaty.' Olivia: Nice! I'll go with: 'Culture, corporations, and defiant women.' Jackson: I like that. 'Defiant' is definitely the right word. Olivia: And it's the perfect word to frame our discussion today. We're talking about Ruth Ozeki's debut novel, My Year of Meats. Jackson: Right. And what's wild is that Ozeki herself worked in Japanese TV, producing documentaries about American life. She said the novel grew out of the bizarre, real-life anecdotes she collected from behind the camera. Olivia: Exactly. It’s no surprise the book won the Kiriyama Prize and gets compared to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. It pulls back the curtain on two massive industries: media and meat. And it does it with this incredible, sharp-witted, and deeply human story that all starts with a TV show with a very strange premise. Jackson: What kind of strange? What was the show?

Olivia: The show is called 'My American Wife!'. It's a Japanese cooking program sponsored by a powerful American meat lobby called BEEF-EX. And their mission, stated in a memo, is to "foster among Japanese housewives a proper understanding of the wholesomeness of U.S. meats." Jackson: Wait, so it's just corporate propaganda disguised as a cooking show? Olivia: One hundred percent. The tagline the main character, Jane, comes up with is literally "Meat is the Message." Jane Takagi-Little is this sharp, Japanese-American documentary filmmaker who gets hired to find the stars of the show: these perfect, "wholesome" American wives who cook delicious meat dishes. Jackson: That sounds like a recipe for disaster. You can't just manufacture 'wholesome.' Olivia: You can't, but they certainly try. And this is where the book's dark humor just shines. One of the first wives they film is Suzie Flowers. The Japanese crew shows up and is immediately disappointed because Suzie, trying to impress them, replaced her old, worn-out quilt with a new floral bedspread. The director wanted the 'authentic,' old-fashioned one. Jackson: Oh, the irony. They want manufactured authenticity. Olivia: Precisely. It gets worse. Suzie’s signature recipe is a 'Coca-Cola Roast.' The director thinks it's too simple, not 'interesting' enough for TV. So he makes her do take after take of preparing it. They run out of Coke and have to use Pepsi. They make her wash and pat dry the raw rump roast so many times that the meat literally turns gray. Jackson: That's horrifying. They're torturing this poor woman and her roast for a TV segment. Olivia: And the whole time, Jane is the 'cultural pimp,' as she calls herself, trying to translate the director's harsh demands into polite requests. But the real gut punch comes during a segment called the 'Sociological Survey.' In front of his family and the cameras, Suzie's husband, Fred, is asked if he's ever had an affair. He flips a card that says 'YES' and confesses everything. Jackson: No. On camera? For a show about beef? Olivia: On camera. For a show about beef. His marriage implodes right there. And the director, who doesn't even speak English, finds out what happened and his first instinct is to ask if they can add a sex scene with the cocktail waitress to make it more sensational. Jackson: That's just... bleak. What happens to the show? Do they air this train wreck? Olivia: They don't air the confession. Instead, the editors in Japan splice in a scene they shot on the first day, before everything fell apart, of Suzie and Fred happily kissing. They slap a cartoon heart over it and call it a day. When Jane objects, her colleague just shrugs and says, "It's television." Jackson: Wow. So the fake, 'wholesome' life being sold to the audience in Japan is literally built on the destruction of another woman's actual life. That's brutal. Olivia: It is. And while all this manufactured reality is being filmed in America, it's having a devastatingly real impact on a woman in Japan.

Jackson: You're talking about the other main character, Akiko. The one watching the show. Olivia: Exactly. Akiko Ueno is the wife of the Japanese advertising executive who came up with the whole 'My American Wife!' campaign. She's bulimic, dangerously thin, and her husband, John, is obsessed with her infertility. He's convinced that if she just eats more American meat, she'll get healthy and 'fatten up' enough to conceive. Jackson: So he forces her to watch the show and cook the recipes. She's the target audience. Olivia: She is the target. She's the one who has to try and make that disastrous Coca-Cola Roast. Her body becomes this battlefield for her husband's career ambitions and his warped ideas about health and virility. And this is where the book's central metaphor really clicks into place. Jackson: The whole 'meat' thing. Olivia: Yes. The novel constantly draws this parallel. Women's bodies, like the cattle in the feedlots, are treated as commodities. They're meant to be controlled, fattened, and made productive. Their health and autonomy are secondary to their function. And this isn't just a metaphor; the book dives into the very real science behind it. Jackson: This is where it gets into the exposé territory, right? The stuff that gets it compared to The Jungle. Olivia: This is it. Jane, horrified by what she's seeing, starts digging into the meat industry. And she uncovers the history of a synthetic hormone called DES—diethylstilbestrol. Jackson: Hold on. What exactly is DES? Olivia: It was a synthetic estrogen, first synthesized in the 1930s. It was marketed as a miracle drug. The meat industry loved it because it made cattle gain weight faster on less feed. By the 1960s, over 95% of American cattle were getting it. But here's the terrifying part: at the same time, it was being prescribed to millions of pregnant women, supposedly to prevent miscarriages. Jackson: Wait, they were giving the same growth hormone to cattle and pregnant women? Olivia: The very same. And they did this despite early studies on rats showing it caused reproductive deformities. The warnings were ignored. It took decades for the consequences to come out: the daughters of women who took DES, the 'DES daughters,' had staggering rates of rare cancers, infertility, and miscarriages. Jackson: That's horrifying. And the book connects this back to the characters? Olivia: Directly. Jane discovers that she herself is a DES daughter, which is the cause of her own infertility and a miscarriage she suffers. And in one of the most harrowing parts of the book, she films a family on a feedlot whose five-year-old daughter, Rose, has already gone through puberty because of her exposure to the hormones. Her body has matured into that of a grown woman. Jackson: A five-year-old? That’s… I have no words for that. This goes so far beyond a satire about television. Olivia: It becomes a story about a secret poisoning. Jane realizes the 'wholesome' American lifestyle she's being paid to sell is built on a foundation of hidden toxins and corporate greed. She writes in her journal that she has to expose the industry's "stinking heart." The mission of the show is completely subverted.

Jackson: So the book isn't just a critique of the meat industry. It's about how these huge, impersonal systems—corporate advertising, industrial agriculture—invade the most intimate parts of our lives. Our bodies, our relationships, our fertility. Olivia: Exactly. And Ozeki suggests that our response to this is often willful ignorance. She has this incredible insight where Jane realizes that ignorance isn't just a lack of knowledge; it's an act of will. We choose not to know where our food comes from or how our media is made because the knowledge feels paralyzing. The book's power is that it forces us to look. Jackson: And it shows that rebellion isn't always a grand political act. For Akiko, who is being brutally abused by her husband, it's a quiet, personal decision to escape. For Jane, it's using her camera to tell a truer, more dangerous story. Olivia: Right. The two women, connected only by this TV show, end up saving each other. Akiko is inspired by the defiant women Jane puts on screen, and Jane is motivated by Akiko's desperate faxes to finish her exposé. It’s a beautiful, powerful loop of cause and effect. Jackson: It’s a story that feels both of its time—published in the late 90s, wrestling with globalization and food panics—but also incredibly current. The questions about media authenticity and what’s in our food are more relevant than ever. Olivia: It absolutely is. And it leaves you with a powerful question: What 'bad knowledge' are we choosing to ignore in our own lives, and what happens when we finally decide to confront it? Jackson: That's a heavy one. We'd love to hear what you all think. What parts of this story resonated with you? Find us on our socials and join the conversation. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.