by Jennie Abbott and Dianne Brooks, March 1999
The meat-inspired American Dream is a lie. Both at the beginning and the end of the 20th Century, American and international consumers have bought into the big meat-eating scheme, and in both 1906 and 1998 there are novels that look beneath the superficial image of healthy, hard-working Americans eating meat and flourishing under our highly commercialized capitalization.
The American Dream was a great marketing scheme. It is an ideal that brought millions of immigrants to this country because they wanted to believe in a nation that would allow them to work hard and prosper, to find health, wealth, and happiness. Part of the American luxury is having plenty to eat, including meat, and the vast industry of meat production was one way to earn wealth. The dream that entrepreneurs might have access to that wealth was a lie; the results were fixed, and many people died just trying to survive in a new country with high unemployment rates. The two novels highlighted in this paper further explain and describe the fallacy, they do not support the dreams and image of American life that the meat industry has exported over the past hundred years. We report in detail on Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, published in 1998, and The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, published in 1906. The books, though written more than 90 years apart, both detail how that dream is over—yet people ignorantly hold on to ideas of meat as good and healthy, and the industry continues to buy lobby pressure on legislation and challenges international trade rules that do not support their goals.
The books themselves portray an image of America much different from the ones they describe. With a critical eye Ozeki and Sinclair scathingly report the lies behind the idealistic image of America exported via advertisements, international mega-corporations such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, and internationally aired TV shows like Dallas. While The Jungle caused quite a stir in the early years of the century, overall the attention these two books drew was minimal compared to the mass-produced image already associated with America as a super-power and as a role model. McDonald’s is an icon of America, which is associated with the ubiquitous hamburger. "McDonald’s has a very high profile and is spending a fortune promoting its image," (Vidal, 51) which in turn promotes a particular image of America.
In Ozeki’s book the beef industry (BEEF-EX) was exporting a trite, 1950’s "ideal" image of America, where wives are pretty and raise their families on lots of meat. Looking "under the hood" of the beef industry, though, both Sinclair and Ozeki find that the meat is often toxic, the industry unsafe for people raising livestock and packaging meat, and that the image of meat as healthy and American is deceptive. Superficially, Americans raised on hormone-filled meat seem fine, but under closer scrutiny, Ozeki found men showing signs of physical feminization from eating estrogen-enhanced chicken and shockingly early menarche in girls exposed to DES and other chemicals used to fatten livestock more quickly. Neither of these ailments have received much mainstream media attention (or if so, only briefly and not taken seriously by most Americans). When it comes to eating meat, ignorance is bliss.
What is the image of America abroad? Ideas about America are varied, though many are influenced by American TV shows that reach foreign audiences, American movies, and advertising campaigns taking advantage of the appeal of everything American to target foreign consumers. Some images include rolling farms and pleasant mid-Western farmers working in an agrarian-based economy, the pioneers from Plymouth Rock, the "wild west," and then Hollywood. As for the image of Americans as fat and lazy—primarily it’s that Americans are greedy, and that everything is big here in the land of plenty: the land, the cars, the dinner servings, the houses (as seen on TV) and McDonald’s. Foreigners have the idea that in America there is a McDonald’s on every street corner and that we always eat there.
1998: My Year of Meats
A growing new breed in Japan, according to Joseph Coleman in an article for the Associated Press, is the overweight man. In May of last year the Japanese government announced the results of a study that found one of three men in their thirties to be at least slightly overweight. The Japanese palate is changing as a result of affluence and the availability of Western foods. (McDonald’s started getting big in the ‘60’s; in 1967 the first restaurants opened outside US, and in 1978 "the 5000th restaurant opened in Kanagawa in Japan." (Vidal, 35)) Beef at McDonald's and at local imitators and popular convenience stores which sell stacks of lunchbox-type meals are major contributors to the change in eating habits. Lifestyles and work schedules have changed, too. Men typically spend their days in rat race jobs that involve quick fast-food type lunches and evenings out entertaining clients over filet mignon or other cholesterol-laden foods rather than traditional Japanese favorites like raw fish and vinegar-laced rice. (Coleman)
The traditional Japanese diet not only protects against obesity and its attendant health risks, it also protects against breast cancer. Researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center recently completed an experiment in which 25 American women with breast cancer followed a traditional Japanese diet for three months. By eating a diet low in fat and heavy in fish oils, soy products and vegetables, including leafy greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and carrots, the women experienced a fourfold increase in the ratio of cancer-inhibiting polyunsaturated fatty acids. More of these omega-3 PUFAs in their blood plasma over another type of PUFAs, omega-6, promotes the growth of cancer cells. According to the UCLA researchers, Japanese women who eat traditional diets have a relatively low incidence of breast cancer, but when they come to this country and eat as Americans do, the frequency of the disease rises to that of American women in a single generation. (Burke)
The Japanese diet, in spite of its benefits, is becoming less common in Japan for more reasons than work schedules and taste preferences. One major reason for the change is that Japan does not produce enough food to feed itself and for the most part, the younger generation of Japanese have no desire to become farmers or livestock producers. Also, seafood supplies are decreasing at an alarming rate. Currently, the 130 million people in Japan consume an average of 70 to 80 pounds of fish per person per year, but with decreasing supplies, the time is ripe for a change in the traditional diet and for someone to turn this situation into a profit. American officials in Tokyo see these factors as an excellent opportunity for beef and pork producers. According to W. John Child, minister-counselor for agricultural affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, there is a built-in fascination among the Japanese people for anything American, and agricultural products are no exception. Beef and pork exports to Japan in 1995 totaled $2.7 billion. According to Stanley Miller, vice president, international sales-Japan for Excel Inc., the Wichita-based meat packer, exports are probably the best revitalization program the American economy will ever have. (Taschler)
Unfortunately for American economic interests, food safety concerns reduced world export potential in 1996, and U.S. exports declined from an earlier projection of 894,00 tons to 849,000 tons (carcass weight equivalent). Beef export volumes in the first half of 1996 were 38 percent ahead of 1995 because of strong demand from Japan, but the pace slowed in the second half. Beef consumption in Japan marked a turning point in 1996. It decreased after two decades of growth because consumers were concerned about the safety of the world beef supply. Household beef consumption, which accounts for about 40 percent of beef sales in Japan, declined by about 15 percent and total consumption including food service sales dropped five percent. A weakening yen, making imported beef more expensive, an increase in the consumption tax from three to five percent, and a decline in domestic beef production were projected to corral consumption levels in 1997. (USDA)
The main cause of the decline in beef imports in Japan was the impact of a deadly virus, 0-157 E. coli, which caused food poisoning in thousands of people and resulted in numerous fatalities. Still, U.S. exports actually increased to Japan in 1996, from 331,930 tons in 1995 to 336,796 tons in 1996, as most of the decline in imports came from reduced sales of Australian beef. And although the outlook for 1997 indicated a slight decline in imports, U.S. exports were expected to do well as demand remained strong for high-value U.S. beef.(USDA)
America meats the world at the end of the twentieth century to an even greater degree than it did at the beginning. The industry has both profited from and influenced the world image of the United States. Ruth Ozeki emphasizes this fact in her first novel, My Year of Meats. The story opens as Jane Takagi-Little, an aspiring documentary filmmaker, accepts an offer to be the American coordinator for the Japanese television series My American Wife! The Beef Export and Trade Syndicate, BEEF-EX, sponsors the show which features a new American family and a delicious meat recipe each week. By exploiting the Japanese people’s love for everything American, the show attempts to increase their consumption of beef.
At first Jane tries to please her corporate bosses, but soon she begins to disregard BEEF-EX’s preference for "normal" Americans. She features a Hispanic Texas family with a dozen adopted Korean children and even an interracial vegetarian Lesbian couple. The Japanese ad representative, Joichi "John" Ueno, wants to fire her, but her popularity with the television audience makes her untouchable.
Meanwhile in Japan, John’s wife Akiko watches every show as her husband has insisted that she do. Every week she fills out a survey for her husband and then cooks the day’s meat. Of course, she cannot please him because the show doesn’t please him and many of the recipes don’t even feature beef as they are supposed to. As he becomes increasingly abusive, Akiko wishes more and more that she could be part of the American families she sees on television.
For Jane, the problems with the show become centered on the fact that the more research she does during her search for families to feature, the more she learns about the horrors of hormone and antibiotic use in cattle breeding. Just as she becomes pregnant, she learns about the problems that the now-banned DES caused in the humans who consumed meat before the ban. Her own misshapen uterus, she decides, was probably caused by her mother’s use of DES to prevent a possible miscarriage.
As she realizes that the show is working against her own beliefs, Jane decides to expose the truth at the expense of her job and even of her pregnancy. As she is planning her last show, Akiko writes to her for advice. Her husband’s abuse has become unbearable and she decides that she wants to come to America to live among the kind of real people that Jane has actually been portraying on the television show.
Although Jane loses her baby, Akiko gives birth to a child as an independent woman in America. Ozeki successfully uses the meat theme to explore not only the meat industry’s creation and exploitation of an image of America in the world, especially in Asia, but also the stereotyped roles of husbands and wives and the cultural crossover between East and West. She explores themes of the commonality of the abuse of women in two vastly different cultures as well as women’s health issues and the changing make-up of functional family units.
Stephan Faris, in his review of the book for the Tucson Weekly, says that Ozeki tries to mobilize her readers to action, against meat and toward physical and sociological health, by giving the villain a face. The men of the meat industry are so evil in her created world that it becomes possible to blame them for more of society’s problems, both in America and in the world America presumes to influence, than Faris seems to believe any one industry could cause (Faris). Ufrieda Ho’s review of Ozeki’s book, however, states that though the plot is fictitious, it includes accurate facts on the meat industry and particularly about the dangers of growth hormones which have been injected into cattle. Ho adds that it is well documented that some cows are fed everything from cardboard and sawdust to plastic pellets and even offal derived from other cattle and sheep, a feeding method which leads to the fatal mad cow disease (Independent).
It is disease caused by beef consumption, as I mentioned earlier in this paper, that reduced world beef export potential in 1996. Beef consumption in Japan marked a turning point in that year, decreasing after two decades of growth (USDA). In the view of the members of the American Meat Institute, there are only two ways to survive in such a tough business environment. One is to operate as efficiently as possible, lowering excess costs to allow for greater profitability (Boyle). One way to lower costs would clearly be to decrease the cost of feed through the use of such feeding methods as those mentioned above.
The second survival strategy the American Meat Institute espouses is to find or build stronger demand for one’s products. Under this strategy a firm may identify a new market, such as Asia, where its products are in greater demand and command higher prices and export high-end, extremely profitable products. The current economic situation, according to J. Patrick Boyle, the American Meat Institute President and CEO, exists because beef supply is greater than demand, a problem caused in part by the Asian financial crisis. Since what America doesn’t export must be absorbed in the domestic market, an already burdensome supply situation is compounded in this country. Increased supply is exerting downward pressure on prices so that producer’s prices are down and companies in the packing sector are losing money as well (Boyle).
According to Boyle, it would be counterproductive to recommend new regulations that are likely to increase restrictions on packers’ or processors’ competitive market strategies. Rather, producers should be working together with packers and processors to identify strategies to improve consumer demand and confidence, increase market share both at home and abroad, and return profitability to all sectors of the industry. Boyle told the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry in June of 1998, "We have to motivate stronger global demand for U.S. meat and poultry products through efforts, such as partnering with the U.S. government, to develop and promote U.S. agricultural exports." (Boyle)
The U.S. Meat Export Federation, like the American Meat Institute, has immediate concerns about America’s economic need to supply the world’s meat. One concern this organization’s executive vice president Bryant Wadsworth expressed in January of 1996 was about the European Union’s refusal to lift its ban on beef produced with growth promoting hormones. He said, "To not pursue the European Union on this matter would broadcast a clear and damaging signal to all of our trading partners around the world. The United States meat industry and USDA have been very deliberate and patient in seeking to negotiate a resolution to the hormone ban on a bilateral basis. . . At stake is a long-term market for high-quality U.S. beef and beef variety meats in the European Union that could easily approach $200-300 million if we can achieve free and unrestricted access to the EU." (USMEF)
Although Wadsworth states that the scientific evidence is indisputable in favor of the U.S. position and that even the EU’s own scientific conference found conclusively that the five internationally-approved hormones used in the United States pose no risk whatsoever to human health, the USMEF is most deeply committed to the principles of fair trade rather than to principles of either science or human health. The federation is, after all, a national trade association responsible for developing foreign markets for U.S. red meat products.
Certainly other issues besides meat safety and economic advantage play a role in people’s decisions about meat and in their perceptions of America that come from the meat industry. Carol Adams, in her book The Sexual Politics of Meat, brings up issues of animal rights and male power that are also seen in Ozeki’s book, specifically in her description of how cattle are slaughtered in the last segment of Jane’s show and in her descriptions of abuse perpetrated against Akiko by her meat-loving husband. The main issue that becomes clear from Ozeki’s novel as well as facts that support her story is that the American meat industry plays a major role in portraying America’s image to the world as we approach the millennium. Whether that image remains a mostly positive one, as the industry’s own economic interests want and need it to be or becomes increasingly the negative one that Ozeki, Carol Adams, and others seem to show, might take another century to become clear.
1906: The Jungle
Around the turning of the last century America’s meat industry already exported an image of America as a place where all classes of people could succeed. Immigrants followed the lure of this dream only to find that it was a lie, and yet they were trapped in it and were unable to escape.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle illustrates the death sentence the American meat industry delivered to many Eastern European immigrants who came to this country in search of an improved quality of life in the early 1900s. Although implicit in their dream was the promise of economic prosperity that America exported at the height of the Industrial Revolution, their jobs instead exposed them to health hazards both in the workplace and in their homes as they consumed the meat they slaughtered and packaged.
The image Sinclair presented was of an unsafe, greedy, corrupt, and gruesome industry whose products made their way into most American kitchens. His was a "realistic portrayal of the filth, the stench, and cruelty of the stockyards." (p. 347) The meat packing industry fought Sinclair’s charges as well as heightened government regulation in response to The Jungle. Various newspaper articles denied the truth, but the industry had to launch an ad campaign to show the public a better image than Sinclair’s. Still, meat sales dropped 50%, so packers had to clean up their act a little (just enough to get them past inspection). One team of inspectors President Roosevelt sent to Chicago returned with a report confirming the main points Sinclair covered, and within six months of The Jungle being published, the Federal Pure Food and Drug Act and the Beef Inspection Act were passed.
Sinclair’s exposé of the Beef Trust hit the public in the stomach, as Sinclair late wrote. The American public was furious that their canned meats were mislabeled and full of chemicals, while overseas the image of America was tarnished as international readers discovered the lies of the American Dream of good wages and a prosperous life for all—dreams that had lured German, Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak, Yugoslav, and other immigrants to look for jobs in the stockyards. (Downs, Afterword) The Beef Trust fought Sinclair’s accusations, but were unsuccessful in avoiding the passage of the Pure Foods Act.
Similar to the response the Chicago Beef Trust made to The Jungle, McDonald’s sued individuals of London Greenpeace for libel. The organization had distributed informational leaflets heralding the numerous problems associated with eating at McDonald’s. The fact sheets "so offended or worried the image-conscious fast-food corporation" that it had to press charges and make the "truth" known. McDonald’s claimed that they don’t destroy rainforests, mistreat their employees, cause cruelty to animals, spoil the nutritional diet of consumers, ignore food safety rules, or target children in their advertising endeavors. (McLibel, p. 6-9)
The Jungle tells the story of Jurgis Rudkus, the protagonist, who decided to go to America to be wealthy enough to marry. He had heard of the chances to work for high wages at the stockyards, so he and his friends set off for Chicago. At first he believed that he could work hard and make a fair living for himself and his family. However, he soon realized that just surviving would become a struggle, as the income of the whole family was not enough to live on.
Their house was built on landfill and children played in the filthy streets full of flies. With more time for reflection they might have considered how unhealthy their environment was, but they could not afford to do anything about their living situation anyway. Sinclair described in detail how the workers were treated, how the cows were slaughtered, and what was packaged up to sell. After learning what meat was really like in America, the Lithuanians in the story no longer wanted to eat it, which forced them to change their diet, or eat the meat they worked to produce only because they could not afford the high prices of pure beef. When things were really grim the children picked through garbage at the dump for food.
The American Dream that a person could rise by merit, doing good work, turned out to be false. Everyone worked fast and furiously to keep positions that the crowds of unemployed men, women, and children outside the factory could always fill. The only time Jurgis made good money in the stockyards was when he worked as a scab during a union strike. However, during that meat packers union strike Sinclair described, scabs were brought in from all over the country and all lived inside the factory gates. Human disease, sewage, and food, combined with the heat and humidity, made for extremely unsafe conditions for preparing meat that would be distributed to domestic and foreign meat markets. (p. 271)
Signs in the factories required utmost cleanliness of the employees, yet in practice such laws and common sense were ignored for the sake of speed and profit. Animals who arrived diseased, with broken legs, or dead, were mixed with other meat behind the backs of government inspectors—most of whom were part of the graft system of the Chicago meat packers political machine anyway. Some of those cows were about to calve or just had, and if the meat packers had waited a few days the meat would have been fine for food; but the dime waits for no calf, and down the line went entrails, calves and all. Hogs dead of cholera were sent away to make a high grade of lard, and canning meat came from cows sick, malnourished, and "covered with boils."(p. 99)
The meat packing industry was honed for profiting the owners, not for providing pure food for human consumption. Clever and efficient, the meat packers put every last scrap into a can with a label that unsuspecting citizens would buy. For example, "Durham’s canned goods, which had become a national institution," (p. 98) did not contain what the label implied. Potted chicken, for example, was a jumble of tripe, fat of pork, beef suet and hearts, and sometimes the waste ends of veal. Deviled ham consisted of tripe dyed pink, extra bits of smoked beef, potatoes, gullets of beef, and spices. Smoked sausage was mostly potato flour (what remains after starch and alcohol have been extracted). In Europe it was illegal to use potato flour for sausage, but the practice was widely used in the packing houses.
After Jurgis discovered many of these methods of packing meat he began "to see at last how those might be right who had laughed at him for his faith in America." (p. 67) He was disappointed to discover the extent to which the American Dream he sought was an illusion. "The great corporation that employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie." (p. 78) Jurgis’ America, and the one portrayed before The Jungle was published, was a mirage, or false advertising. The Beef Trust was such a powerful conglomerate that it squashed it’s competition, fixed prices, forced down the price of cattle so low as to destroy the stock-raising industry, made its own rules using bribery and corruption, and made a profit at the expense of American consumers—both to their wallets and to their well-being.
Conclusion
It is easy, perhaps, to consider The Jungle as an historical account of pre-regulation days of food production. Ozeki shows, however, that current meat production practices still dance around the rules to turn a better profit, and that both workers and consumers suffer the consequences. In the 1990s the meat industry is dangerous in a high-tech way. Our canned meats are packaged with a detailed list of ingredients, but the chemicals used in breeding, fattening, and slaughtering the animals escape those lists. The multi-national corporate influence still holds sway in legislation. The laws that The Jungle helped to get passed are no longer adequate for the modern technological industry, where contamination is more insidious—and more dangerous in the long term.
The Jungle both reflected and created an image of America’s meat industry in the early years of the 20th century. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats shows that over the intervening 90 years not much has changed: meat, and beef in particular, continues to poison both American and international consumers, and the beef lobby continues to evade careful government regulation. Now, according to Vidal, corporations fund lobby groups, media, etc. to "protect their interests and promote their message to the public."
After the outrage in response to The Jungle waned, the dream of a healthy, prosperous, meat-eating America returned. My Year of Meats has not (yet) garnered much international attention, nor has it brought changes to legislation, but it has challenged the image of the American meat industry and meat marketing abroad. Neither the image of America nor the image of the American meat industry can stay clean as long as large corporations spend money to create a meaty image of America, it is likely that other generations, or other nations, will repeatedly "forget" the foul facts about the meat industry. Now, readers may need more frequently repeated reminders in the shape of novels or other media to aid in revising legislation to more carefully control livestock farmers’ feed methods, regulate slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant practices.
While Americans focus on the importance of retaining our position as a major world economic power, America is also looking more closely at the viability of the meat industry as an important part of our economy in the coming century. Ozeki presents a more positive view of America as an economic power than might at first be evident, and part of her positive view does include the very meat industry that she is criticizing in her novel. Simply by pointing out the industry's shortcomings, she makes it clear that in America we have the freedom to criticize even powerful economic interests.
Akiko is better off in America than she was in Japan. Women, vegetarians, lesbian couples, handicapped children, all are offered opportunities in turn-of-the-milllenium America that none of those groups has ever seen before in the history of mankind. DES has been outlawed as a means of producing more money more quickly and this knowledge gives us hope that other dangerous practices will be stopped as Ozeki and others take enough interest to bring the facts to the public. What Upton Sinclair started in The Jungle in 1906 by focusing American's attention on the need to place human interests above economic interests has not disappeared as the century has progressed. The meat industry has taken strides in putting people's interests into a small part of its agenda, and authors like Ozeki will not let our attention to this important issue disappear. The battle is not yet won, but it is certainly not yet lost.
Bibliography/Works Cited
Boyle, J. Patrick. Testimony before Senate Agriculture Committee--June 10, 1998 http://www.meatami.org/testimony61098.html
Burke, Anne. "Study: Low fat Diet Can Lower Breast Cancer Risk (7/31)," Your Health Daily: The New York Times Syndicate http://nytsyn.com/live/Women%27s_health/212_073197_164207_1898.h Coleman, Joseph. "Japanese Waistlines Grow Wider," Dimensions Online http://www.dimensionsmagazine.com.news06100050.htmFaris, Stephan. "First-Time Novelist Ruth Ozeki Uses Rousing Fiction to Further Her Activist Agenda," Tucson Weekly July 30-August 5, 1998 http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/07-30-98/book2.htm.
"Meaty Mix of fact, fiction menu," Independent online http://www.inc.co.za/online/star/trends/1998/09/trends_meat.html
Ozeki, Ruth L. My Year of Meats. Viking Press, 1998.
Taschler, Joe. "Time to Move in Japanese Market is Now," C-J Online Business 4/20/97 http://www.cjonline.com/stories/042097/market.html
USDA government circular
http://ffas.usda.gov/dlp/circular/1997/97-03/cattle.htm"USMEF Statement Regarding EU Refusal to Lift its Ban on Beef Produced with Internationally-Approved Growth Promoting Hormones," USMEF Press Release -- January 12, 1996
http://beef.org/newsrels/rel_mef/nr_euref_mef.htmlVidal, John. McLibel: burger culture on trial. The New Press. New York.1997.
© 1999 Irwin Courterly Productions and original authors