My Year of Meats

"It’s brilliant. It’s a really amazing book, and it’s very feminine. It’s really how women experience meat as often the cook for the family, but also perhaps as the daughters and wives who are given meat, and it’s about what meat means to different cultures and how we try to sell one culture to the other. The central character is a Japanese-American woman making a documentary for the Japanese market about American meat. In Japan they haven’t got a history of eating a lot of red meat but the Americans were trying to sell it to them, so trying to change their culture. It makes you think about why we eat meat: a lot of it is because of cultural reasons. Think of the Sunday roast. We think we are more cosmopolitan now but even in Britain today, meat is for men, and in many places for a man to become vegetarian is seen as maybe a little bit effete. Isn’t that ridiculous? The book is also a fairly damning exploration of intensive meat. If you go back to Upton Sinclair, it’s about what’s happening in meat factories in America still to this day. Ozeki talks about Japanese culture and what really stays in your mind are these delicate vegetarian Japanese meals which are served and seem to be a much more accurate reflection of their culture than the American roasts being plonked on the table. So I don’t think a culture necessarily does have to have that big heft of red meat at the centre. Also cultures can evolve and change. I think we are at that moment now. In the past in the west we all subscribed to the American model of a good meal as having a big hunk of red meat in it, and to be healthy you eat a lot of red meat, and that’s a sign of success, and maleness, etc. But frankly we are running out of resources and beginning to think, ‘are there different ways to eat?’ Actually, we are not always putting meat at the centre of a meal any more and I’m interested in tracking the evolution of our culture as we move to a more mixed model. “Actually we are not always putting meat the centre of a meal any more” A lot of people have said to me that the western ideal of red meat is spreading to other parts of the world, but I think that’s a little simplistic and patronising. Yes, in some parts of the world people will want more meat as they grow richer. But in others, such as Japan , their own culture is stronger. Also, it works both ways, maybe we are taking on their cultural ideas of food. India is a really good example: they’ve had access to our culture for a long time but they still, because of Hinduism, have a very vegetarian diet, and meanwhile over here, we’re eating a lot of vegetarian curry, so it goes both ways. The idea of meat bringing a family together does still work, and I’m a social anthropologist by training so I sort of celebrate those cultural norms and see them as quite interesting—but I don’t think they need to stay the same forever when we can’t afford to produce that much red meat for all of us to eat all of the time. And whale. I don’t know, I guess if you were going to be really simplistic and you said we were all going to eat a certain kind of diet that was going to help the environment it would help, but I think the great joy of life is diversity. A lot of what My Year of Meats is about is one culture trying to overtake and destroy another but I think there are probably benefits in both cultures. In our conversation so far we’ve very much talked about all of the damage that can be caused by the meat industry, but I think if your culture is northern German and you live in a forest where there are wild pigs, and indeed free-range pigs that are being farmed, then I would argue perhaps to celebrate your local culture, and to eat locally—in that case, there’s no harm in maintaining your pork industry, or your pork-eating habits. But do we want to be doing that everywhere in the world where there are perhaps better, different ways to eat? It’s one of the great joys of travel and life, to discover all of the different ways we eat around the world so I’d hate for it all to be the same."