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

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1. My Year in Cities
2. Organic Food
3. Plex and the Future of Television
4. Every year, that “Pavement reunion” rumor comes around, and every year it’s a load of hooey, right? Right. Until now. Because this time it’s true. Via an exclusive Rolling Stone interview, in a late-night call from Australia, Pavement guitarist Scott “Spiral Stairs” Kannberg confirms that the Nineties’ finest indie rockers are finally going back to those gold soundz. “It’s been a long time coming,” Kannberg says. “I think in the back of our minds, we always thought we’d do something again. But we never really talked about it until the last couple of months. It’s come together fast.
5. Princeton’s Paul Ohm writes about Netflix’s insane new plan to release millions of customers’ personal information — ZIP code, gender, year of birth — as a sequel to its Netflix Challenge. Latanya Sweeney’s famous study on de-anonymizing data has shown that date (not just year) of birth, gender and ZIP are sufficient to personally identify 87% of Americans. In other words, Netflix is about to put the behavioral data about viewing choices for millions of Americans into the public domain, despite its legal duty to keep this information private.

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