My Year of Meats
Just finished reading Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, which to my surprise was an excellent book. We’ve had it on our shelf for probably 3 years now, if not more, and I just recently picked it up to read during lunch. The story peaked my interest in two ways, the first being how Ozeki’s character became enlightened to the problems of factory farming and the use of chemicals and hormones in meat production. Both issues I am well aware of, as I was vegetarian for over 5 years from high school into my mid-2os. The story, however, brought this knowledge back to the forefront and has caused me to seriously reconsider my diet options. Not sure what is going to come out of this yet, but I did go grocery shopping yesterday (Wegman’s — the greatest grocery store in the U.S.) and did find myself searching out organic options — both meat and fruits/vegetables. The problem being was organic meat in western New York is few and far between, and even then it is VERY expensive. We’ll see though–vegetarianism may become an option again.
The second point, that stood out was a page near the end of the book. The main gist of this page was very inspiring and can be summed up in the excerpt below:
“I chose to ignore what I knew. [...] I would like to think of my ‘ignorance’ less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.”
From My Year of Meats, by Ruth L. Ozeki.
The idea of “faux dumb” culture is an outstanding expression for an issue that I initially became aware of by reading academics like Noam Chomsky. Not sure if Ozeki is the originator of this phrase, but I do think it is excellent nonetheless. Its prevalence is noticeable in everything news-related nowadays, whether it is Michael Jackson, Terri Schiavo, the Pope, Brad dumping Jen, whatever. And I
