The Relevance of Truth in My Year of Meats

     Stories have always been in a position to move us: from tall-tales to documentaries. There is more trust, however put into stories that relate to “real-life” and less weight in the fictional, but these lines are not always so clear. Throughout Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats we are exposed to a series of docudrama episodes produced by Jane Takagi-Little and sponsored by a meat corporation, BEEF-EX, that slowly build from trite to critically exposing aspects of the meat industry. All are shown to have the potential to affect and change the lives of the viewer from the critical perspective of the character Akiko, a member of the show’s target audience who consumes each episode, drawn to the lives of the Americans she sees on TV and inspired to escape her own unhappy existence. Through Jane and Akiko’s eyes we are also shown the critical fallacies in BEEF-EX’s company-line that expose the cultural message of the story of meat, a broadly accepted understanding of meat as related to culture, as more propaganda than fact. Using feminist-vegetarian theory and quotes from the book, I will examine the story of meat as presented in the novel as well as the other “truthful stories,” and demonstrate how immaterial truth is when it comes to the importance of a story.