The Limits of Romancing Food in the Neoliberal Era: Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats

Ruth L. Ozeki`s My Year of Meats houses a tension between two ways of engaging with food: one is taking a “romantic” approach by depicting food as a source of inspiration and pleasure that enables cross-cultural rapport, and the other is taking an expository approach that involves investigating the process of food production, circulation, and consumption as framed by the global neoliberal economy. The interplay of these two perspectives is productive in that it highlights how food operates on a number of different levels: as a livelihood, a cultural signifier, and economic currency. It is, however, the investigative approach that subsumes the romantic approach in the end, for its impulsive, idiosyncratic, and aesthetic ways of engaging with food is found to downplay, and even neutralize, the gruesome reality of modern-day food production. This conclusion is especially pertinent to the current times, in which writings about food increasingly stress the necessity of knowing the ontology of food, or experiencing food viscerally, as a highly affective, spontaneous, and vital substance. The journey the novel takes into the underbelly of meat industry is a reminder that food is an asset circulating according to the dictates of efficiency and profit, not an object of romance that captivates the consumer with its palatable and transformative substance.