Jane Tagaki-Little, the protagonist of Ozeki's My Year of Meats, is an abnormally tall Japanese-American woman raised in the midwest and currently living in New York. As the novel begins, Tagaki is offered a position on the television crew of My American Wife!, a quasi-documentary shot in America and aired in Japan. My American Wife! seeks to introduce the moral values of wholesome American families to Japanese households via a half hour cooking show centered around various cuts of beef. As Tagaki sums up in her job description, the show will transmit "the hearty sense of warmth, of comfort, of heart and home" to Japanese women.
In opening shows, Tagaki and her Japanese crew dutifully seek out model American families. As her Japanese boss outlines, "pork is possible, but beef is best." Soon Tagaki grows restless with the types of families she must portray, and with her demeaning Japanese boss John Ueno. She features a Mexican-American family with a recipe for Beefy Burritos. Ueno is displeased. Tagaki profiles a white couple with an unusually large family of adopted Korean, Japanese and Chinese children. Ueno is enraged. In perhaps the ultimate act of defiance, Tagaki tapes a lesbian vegetarian couple who help raise her own awareness of hormone-contaminated meat.
Watching the shows at home is John Ueno's wife Akiko. Akiko is a meek, troublingly trim women. As she watched, rates and cooks the meal from each episode of My American Wife!, Akiko finds herself increasingly attracted to the lifestyles the show presents. Trapped in an abusive relatiobship with John Ueno and unable to provide him with child, Akiko reaches out to Tagaki for advice.
When Tagaki profile of Colorado family with a cattle feedlot she uncovers some disturbing truths about the use of growth hormones in the cattle industry and its effect on the humans who consume tainted meat. Jane rushes to film a series of subversive tapes before John Ueno flies in to oversee production. In an accident at the slaughterhouse, Jane is injured. Her crew smuggles the tapes to her, presenting destroyed tapes to her boss, and Tagaki is left unemployed, but with the documentary footage she's always longed for.
When Akiko finds herself pregnant after a brutal rape by her husband, she flies to America, seeking to model her life on that of couples portrayed in My American Wife! Akiko is the catalyst Tagaki needs to edit her documentary footage. The Colorado feedlot family goes public about the effects of these hormones, enabling Tagaki to sell her documentary footage.
Throughout My Year of Meats, Ozeki shows the reader thoughtful and drawn-out characters. Even as she seeks to galvanize the reader with her portrayal of the meat business, Ozeki never dumbs down her information. Readers with find her first novel humorous, touching, and laugh out loud funny. Unfortunately, the information about DES and hormones is true, and Ozeki includes a resource guide at the end of the book. My Year of Meats will stay with the reader long after finishing, and perhaps, it will spur an education into the practices of the meat industry. At least, this is what Ozeki hopes.
