My Year of Meats - Ruth Ozeki

Written by Ruth Ozeki
Read by Anna Fields
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 56 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: November 9, 2004
Duration: 11:14:04

A modern-day take on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

With reality, humor, and a message about corporate greed, veteran filmmaker Ruth Ozeki weaves together the story of two women a world apart.

Jane, a struggling filmmaker in New York, is given her big break, a chance to travel through the United States to produce a Japanese television program sponsored by an American meat-exporting business. But along the way, she discovers some unsavory truths about love, honor, and a particularly damaging hormone called DES that wreaks havoc with her uterus.

Meanwhile, Akiko, a painfully thin Japanese woman struggling with bulimia, is being pressured by her child-craving husband to put some meat on her bones, literally. How Jane’s and Akiko’s lives intersect in wacky cross-cultural collisions provides romance, humor, intrigue, and even a muckraking message about questionable meat and the homogenization of America.

This is the perfect fiction companion to The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food by Michael Polland.

“A stunning combination of outstanding writing and performance, this delicately woven and touching account toggles its first-person point of view from that of our heroine, a Japanese-American videographer who lives in New York City, to that of a Japanese wife. Akiko, the wife, forms vicarious links with our heroine through harrowing and bizarre circumstances. Anna Fields flawlessly embodies all of the extreme characters in this work. Fields is a wonder as she flows from Japanese to various American accents and Japanese-inflected American. Her tour de force delivery of this feminist satire provides a refreshing dose of comedy to serious issues–meat, sex, and cultural pressure.”…. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile