My Year of Meats

Summary

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 Dilemmaand In Defense of Food.