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SUMMER HARRISON

Environmental Justice Storytelling:

Sentiment, Knowledge, and the
Body in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of
Meats

Addressing the climate change “belief gap,” a recent study by law

professor Dan Kahan suggests “there is in fact little disagreement
among culturally diverse citizens on what science knows about climate
change” (1). The source of the “climate-change controversy and like
disputes” is, rather, “the contamination of education and politics with
forms of cultural status competition” (1). The beliefs we form about sci-
entific phenomena are influenced by our strong desire to “enjoy the
sense of identity enabled by membership in a community defined by
particular cultural commitments” (1). In other words, climate change
denial is not caused primarily by a lack of information or knowledge,
but by a lack of identification with the cultural community of climate
change believers.
For the environmental community, this belief gap suggests that
attempts to educate the public through the use of scientific facts fails to
acknowledge something fundamental about human understanding.
Despite its importance, especially given the recent rise of so-called
“alternative facts,” access to this knowledge does not account for the
role of emotion and identity in the creation of our beliefs. As cognitive
linguist George Lakoff argues, “most of us have inherited [an
Enlightenment] theory of mind . . . that reason is conscious, literal,
logical, unemotional, disembodied, universal” (2). A more accurate

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458 I S L E

New Enlightenment view “would not abandon reason, but rather

understand that we are using real reason—embodied reason, reason
shaped by our bodies and brains and interactions in the real world, rea-

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son incorporating emotion, structured by frames and metaphors and
images and symbols” (13). Reason and emotion are not separable, he
reminds us, but complementary and inextricable. It is not facts alone
that convince people of things, but the way facts are framed, or the
way they activate the frames we already possess for how to understand
the world.
If overcoming this belief gap requires linking environmental facts
to emotion, metaphor, and symbolism, then as ecocritics we must con-
sider what role literary narratives can play in this process. Although
environmental literature often explores the relationship between social
structures and beliefs about nature to critique injustices, political fic-
tion like Ruth Ozeki’s has long inspired debate about the ethical effects
of narrative persuasion. On the one hand, readers critique the use of
emotional appeals in works of fiction as being manipulative and overly
simplistic. On the other, narratives offer a means of organizing and
processing moral knowledge that a facts-only approach cannot
achieve. Thus, for writers of environmental fiction, the challenge is to
effectively document real environmental issues in a way that taps the
power of emotional narrative without becoming reductive.
My Year of Meats, I contend, offers us one model for navigating this
tension: juxtaposing sentimental stories with relevant environmental
facts, and embedding both in a self-conscious narrative that actively
reflects on its own capacity for generating political affect. Ozeki uses
this unusual “documentary” narrative mode both to depict environ-
mental injustices linked to the global meat industry and to interrogate
how commercial representations of human/nonhuman bodies legitim-
ize their violent exploitation. While the novel condemns the passive
use of sentimentality to produce nostalgia and commercial desire, it
demonstrates how sentiment, properly contextualized and self-aware,
can be an effective tool for combatting environmental ignorance and
inspiring political action. Ultimately, Ozeki reveals how a critical
understanding of the narratives that shape our imagination of bodies
and environments is as crucial to political change as data on toxicity
and pollution.
Since how we tell stories influences how we act in the world, it is ne-
cessary not only to decry specific environmental injustices, but also to
reconsider how we construct the narratives that authorize or challenge
them. A study by political scientists Adam Berinsky and Donald
Kinder suggests that “ordinary citizens’ understanding of politics
depends in systematic and intelligible ways on how information is
 Environmental Justice Storytelling 459

presented to them . . . framing information in ways that conform to the

structure of a good story appears to change understanding, and under-
standing, in turn, appears to shape opinion” (654). Narrative frames,

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then, “not only enhance understanding; they influence opinions” (654).
Since narratives affect how we understand environmental prob-
lems and solutions, evaluate the ethical questions of risk distribution
and access to resources, and imagine the connections between environ-
mental degradation and other oppressions, they become a crucial com-
ponent of environmental justice work. If, as Rob Nixon reminds us,
“transnational corporations are potent, active players in manufactur-
ing the icons and stories that shape popular perception of environmen-
tal science and policy,” the role of what he calls writer-activists is to
“devise arresting stories, images, and symbols” that can “help us ap-
prehend threats imaginatively that may remain imperceptible to the
senses” and to “amplify the media-marginalized causes of the environ-
mentally dispossessed” (38, 3, 5).
This essay uses Ozeki’s novel as a case study to investigate how
such “arresting” stories work to shape not only popular conceptions of
environmental problems but also our feelings about the people and
places affected by environmental injustices. To combat corporate nar-
ratives about the environment, we need to devise stories that activate
neural emotional frames while also informing us about “marginalized
causes.” While the environmental justice movement has usefully
expanded wilderness-based definitions of the environment to include
places where we live, work, play, worship, and learn, greater attention
is needed to the literary and cultural narratives—the frames—which
shape our attitudes and practices toward these places. Environmental
fictions like My Year of Meats call attention not only to specific injustices
but also to how they are represented and constructed in the stories
we tell.

Considering Narrative Sentiment

Ozeki’s novel tells the story of Japanese American narrator Jane
Tagaki-Little’s growing awareness of environmental injustices during
her “year of meat”—the year she spends working as a director for a
meat-themed television show called My American Wife. This Japanese-
aired documentary program combines cooking segments with lifestyle
pieces on various American wives to promote meat consumption in
Japan on behalf of a US trade syndicate called BEEF-EX. There are three
different “documentaries” at work in the text: the television show
(which documents “red meat” American food culture), Jane’s inde-
pendent documentary film on the global meat industry (which
460 I S L E

documents the effects of toxic exposures on marginalized human/non-

human bodies), and the novel itself (which documents the role of
media storytelling in our understanding of environmental informa-
tion).1 Through these documentaries, the novel critiques commercial-

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ized uses of sentiment as well as purely factual modes of
communication while insisting that emotional appeals, in their appro-
priate informational contexts, are useful and even necessary for polit-
ical persuasion.
The text self-consciously mimics documentary style by combining
factual descriptions of the meat industry with heart-wrenching tales of
deformed children, impoverished families, and valiant fights against
corporate corruption. This unusual combination of rhetorical modes
has, however, left the novel open to criticisms both of its
“manipulative” sentimentality and of its un-literary factuality. While
filming one episode, for instance, Jane attempts to capture the “heart-
breaking radiance” of a young car accident victim using convention-
ally sentimental rhetoric: “her hair shone like a mutable golden
corona” and her “eyes of an angel . . . spilled crystalline tears of beati-
tude and joy” (137). Such language has led some critics to describe the
novel as the literary equivalent of Lifetime movie or as ripe for Oprah’s
Book of the Month Club (Mehta, Faris). In a more substantial critique
of the novel’s sentimentality, Shameem Black reminds us that senti-
mental literature’s focus on individual suffering often masks broader
power relations, thereby allowing sympathizers to ignore their own
complicity in others’ suffering (81).
What many critiques of the novel’s sentimentality overlook, how-
ever, is the distinction between My American Wife’s use of sentiment
and the novel’s. While the show relies on sentimental manipulation to
sell its corporate meat, the novel critiques this sentimentality by expos-
ing its constructedness. For example, in an episode featuring wife
Suzie Flowers, the iconic Norman Rockwell-esque pairing of family
and hearth becomes a simulacrum: rather than a roaring fire, the cou-
ple basks in the “flickering light from an electric yule log, left there all
year round” while sitting “nervously on a brand-new pink shag rug
from Wal-Mart” (1). My American Wife is tasked with selling what Jane
describes as a “vast illusion of America” (8). In fact, Ozeki’s dramatiza-
tion of this show was inspired by her own work for a show called Mrs.
America. Similarly sponsored by an American meat industry lobby
group and aired in Japan, it was designed to “depict happy, rural
American families enjoying delicious meals” (“My Year”).
Like Mrs. America, each episode of My American Wife must
“culminate in the celebration of a featured meat, climaxing in its glori-
ous consumption,” and the featured wife must also be “attractive,
 Environmental Justice Storytelling 461

appetizing, and all-American” because she is “Meat Made Manifest”

(8). These “authentic” American wives become the bodily conduit for
transmitting the “traditional family values symbolized by red meat in

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rural America” (8). The wives embody all-American values, which in
turn inculcate a desire for American meat. The wives, the values, and
the meats mutually reinforce each other, and together constitute an
“attractive” package for the product they are selling. Critics like Emily
Cheng criticize the novel for situating women within the family as
guardians of “cultural values” (194). However, Ozeki actually critiques
this stereotype by revealing that this idealized image of America is a
constructed fiction motivated by corporate power.
The novel’s reader sees the effort put into making the fake seem
real. The show employs “food stylists” and “meat wranglers” who
labor over steaks with “little camel-hair brushes to achieve just the
right blush of pink” (42). Food styling becomes particularly fraught for
Suzie Flowers, whose “Coca-Cola Roast” recipe, featuring “Coca Cola
(not Pepsi, please!),” is included in the text (19). The slapstick humor of
the scene in which Suzie prepares the recipe rests on the contrast be-
tween Coke as the “real thing” and Pepsi as an imposter. When the
store runs out of Coke, they must keep refilling the original bottle with
Pepsi. Later, Jane’s producer remarks on the commercial appeal of
associating beef with a classic American commodity like Coca-Cola
and Jane replies with a tongue-in-cheek response that sums up not just
this episode, but the show’s problem in general: “It’s Pepsi, Kenji. Not
the real thing at all” (30). By self-consciously questioning the “realness”
of the episode’s depiction, Jane introduces a tension between sentiment
and its representation that is then developed throughout the novel.
While the Pepsi substitution is an innocuous and even funny mis-
representation, the editing of the Flowers’ footage demonstrates a
more sinister falsification: the emotive appeal as commercial propa-
ganda. When, during the faux-academic “Sociological Survey” seg-
ment, Suzie’s husband reveals that he is having an affair and leaves,
the producer reorders the scenes to make it appear that the couple rec-
onciles in time for a “special Valentine’s Day” kiss by the fireplace (29).
To Jane’s objection to this falsehood, the producer reminds her that she
“choose[s] all the content. The only thing you don’t do is cut” (30). In
this moment, she realizes that “editing is what counts” because it can
alter a narrative’s meaning and affect the audience’s response (30). The
tension established in this scene resonates throughout the novel as Jane
becomes increasingly aware of the importance not just of content but of
cutting—the form in which content is presented. Through this attention
to form, rather than dispensing with sentiment, Ozeki seeks to use
462 I S L E

sentiment ethically by making its construction transparent and provid-

ing the reader with contextual knowledge.
In its embrace of sentimentality, the novel echoes philosopher

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Richard Rorty’s emphasis on a “sentimental education” which manip-
ulates audiences through telling “sad and sentimental stories” to impel
them to “imagine themselves in the shoes of the despised and
oppressed” (179). This imaginative capacity is at the heart of Ozeki’s
approach to narrative sentiment. The “emergence of human rights
culture,” Rorty claims, “seems to owe nothing to increased moral
knowledge, and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories”
(172). Although such an approach can problematically rely on sympa-
thetic appeals to those in power, David Palumbo-Liu insists that “we
ignore the sentimental at our own risk—rather than simple knowledge
or ‘rationality’ it might be the most powerful tool in persuasive story-
telling, and progressives should reclaim that as a tool” (66). In fact,
Robin Warhol’s conception of sentimental literatures as “technologies
of affect” suggests that rather than draining away excess feelings or
preventing readers from taking action in the real world, such stories
can get the reader into a “pose of weeping,” which then has the poten-
tial to generate real compassion (20). However, while Rorty insists that
“most of the work of changing moral intuitions is . . . done by manipu-
lating our feelings rather than increasing our knowledge,” Ozeki’s
novel implies that, while necessary, a “sentimental education” without
contextual knowledge is insufficient for combating environmental
injustice.
My Year of Meats complicates its sentimentality in two ways. First,
Ozeki employs an unusual narrative mode characterized by shifts be-
tween sentimental fiction and nonfictional “Documentary Interlude”
sections, which provide information about, for instance, the use of
growth hormones on animals and women, or the environmental im-
pact of factory farming. Second, the novel examines how stories and in-
formation can be rhetorically “packaged” to produce affect or change
minds by embedding the sad stories in Jane’s self-reflexive narration.

Sad Stories and Documentary Interludes

The first strategy, shifting between sentimental stories and nonfic-
tional interludes, is illustrated when Jane prepares for an episode about
a low-income African American family from the South. While discus-
sing the family’s cooking habits, the father, Mr. Purcell, reveals his per-
sonal run-in with hormonally contaminated chicken. “Used to be they
had these parts that was real good. And cheap down at the packin’
house,” he recounts (117). However, his wife adds that these parts
 Environmental Justice Storytelling 463

made his “barry-tone” come out “soundin’ serpraner,” and caused him
to develop enlarged breasts, both signs of estrogen poisoning (117).
Mr. Purcell explains that “it was some medicines they was usin’ in the

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chickens that got into the necks that we was eatin’” (117).
This encounter documents Purcell’s “sad story” and actually moti-
vates the once complacent Jane to begin the research on meat industry
abuses that eventually shapes her commitment to environmental justice:
I knew about antibiotics . . . and I guess I knew that hor-
mones were used too. I’d just never given it much
thought before. But now I couldn’t get the image of Mr.
Purcell out of my head. And suddenly I wanted to know
more. Once I started researching, it didn’t take me long
to stumble across DES. It was a discovery that ultimately
changed my relationship with meats and television. It
also changed the course of my life. Bear with me; this is
an important Documentary Interlude. (123)
While neither working for the meat industry nor consuming meat had
convinced her to research its practices, the emotionally charged “image
of Mr. Purcell” does—providing us with internal evidence of the effect-
iveness of sentimental appeals. As it spurs Jane to action, this is a cru-
cial moment for the novel’s rhetorical project that illustrates both the
affective power of sentiment and the corresponding need for empirical
knowledge to contextualize sad stories.
Despite their power, personal narratives always run the risk of mak-
ing structural environmental problems—such as the health impacts of
factory farming on marginalized populations—into individual prob-
lems. To counteract this, Ozeki embeds her story in a nonfictional ac-
count of the larger forces that cause environmental injustices. Thus, the
“Documentary Interlude” following Mr. Purcell’s scene traces the his-
tory of synthetic estrogen, citing actual FDA policy, scientific studies,
and medical journals to demonstrate the dangerous use of the growth
hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES) in meat production and the scientific-
ally unfounded use of DES to prevent human miscarriages.
Invented in 1938 to enlarge the breasts of male chickens, even early
studies suggested that DES-contaminated meats disproportionately
affected low-income and people of color. Jane cites one study that
“discovered that dogs and males from low-income families in the
South were developing signs of feminization after eating cheap chicken
parts and wastes from processing plants” (124). Growth hormone pel-
lets were often inserted into chicken necks, for instance, on the assump-
tion that households would throw them out, an assumption that
privileges white middle-class eating habits and endangers the
464 I S L E

low-income and minority populations who use them. Based on the

experiences of victims like Mr. Purcell, the FDA banned DES use in
chickens, but ironically continued to allow its use in cattle and women.

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As Jane notes, within a decade of DES’s 1954 patent as the “first artifi-
cial growth stimulant,” 95 percent of US cattle operations were using
the drug despite reports of estrogen poisoning in farmers and consum-
ers (124). Because it made meat production so much more efficient, and
necessitated the confinement of cattle, DES almost single-handedly
ushered in the practice of factory farming.
Like hazardous waste pollution, the negative environmental health
effects of factory farming are disproportionately distributed among low-
income and people of color. Research since the novel’s publication has
continued to demonstrate these effects. One study, for instance, found
that “census blocks in Mississippi with high percentages of African
Americans or people in poverty were much more likely to be the loca-
tions of swine CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations]”
(Wilson et al. 196). Another demonstrated that using hormones and anti-
biotics in feed constituted a “major risk” to producers and consumers,
and that exposure to factory farming pollution increased rates of
asthma, depression, impaired balance, and intellectual dysfunction
(Pew Commission 6). Although DES in cattle production was finally
banned in 1979, Jane writes that the majority of cattle on factory feedlots
still receive some form of growth hormone or pharmaceutical. Despite
evidence of consumer risk, she reports that it took “almost a decade of
bitter political struggle to ban the drug, overcoming tremendous oppos-
ition launched by the drug companies and the meat industry,” neither of
which wanted to forego the enormous profits DES generated (126). If
Wendell Berry famously called eating an “agricultural act,” for Ozeki
eating “is now primarily a commercial, economic act” since every bite
we take “is the result of a series of decisions” made by government, cor-
porations, and marketing agencies (Clyne interview).
The Documentary Interlude illustrates the devastating effects of these
decisions on women’s bodies specifically. Starting in 1947, DES was pre-
scribed to prevent miscarriages and premature births despite several
studies on animals suggesting that DES caused deformities of the sexual
organs and cancer in offspring.2 However, pharmaceutical companies
discounted this evidence and aggressively advertised their product,
leading, as Jane reports, “many doctors [to prescribe] it casually as a vita-
min, to an estimated five million women around the world” (125).
Modeling Ozeki’s larger narrative strategy, Jane links this Interlude
to her own unfolding “sad story” of DES-related infertility—caused not
through meat consumption, but through the gendered racial stereotypes
that rendered her mother exceptionally vulnerable to prescribed DES.
 Environmental Justice Storytelling 465

The physical difference of Ma’s Japanese body, in contrast to the “large-

bodied Swedes and sturdy Danes” in her Midwestern community, led
her doctor to prescribe DES based on an orientalist perception of Asian

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bodies as fragile and helpless. “Doctor say I am so delicate,” Ma remem-
bers (156). In foregrounding the effects of toxicity on multiply-
marginalized bodies, the novel aligns with the intersectional model
Noel Sturgeon calls “global feminist environmental justice analysis”—
an approach that examines the “interactive relationship” between
various “social inequalities and environmental problems” to uncover
the structures of power that circulate through narratives of nature and
commerce (6).
The DES narrative Jane uncovers demonstrates how women’s
bodies become commercialized sites, and also suggests the radical po-
tential of defining this abuse as an environmental justice issue. Despite
Ozeki’s focus on motherhood and reproduction, Jennifer Ladino notes
that her perspective cannot be reduced to “affinity ecofeminism,”
which assumes an essential affinity between women and nature (134).
Instead, the novel positions “women’s bodies [as] particularly fraught
sites” that both “bear the disproportionate effects of global capitalism”
and can become “potential sites of resistance to global capitalism”
(132). Advocating for the inclusion of gender and sexuality as factors of
analysis in the environmental justice movement, Rachel Stein argues
that women must “view our bodies as ‘homes,’ ‘lands,’ or ‘environ-
ments,’ that have been placed at risk, stolen from us, and even killed
due to social or physical harms that may be exacerbated due to our
gender and sexuality” (2). In fact, women’s bodies are particularly vul-
nerable to certain environmental toxins that affect reproductive organs
and bioaccumulate in fatty tissue.3 Representing this kind of violence
is part of the mission Ozeki outlines in an interview—to show how the
“workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery im-
pact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg
through a woman’s fallopian tube” (“A Conversation” 8).
Indeed, Jane characterizes her own DES exposure as a form of bod-
ily violence. When diagnosed with infertility and cervical cancer, Jane
describes seeing her deformed uterus on an X-ray in violent terms, say-
ing her “uterus had been coldcocked” (153). Depicting the womb as a
site of violence rather than safety, she notes that “the bludgeoning [her]
uterus received occurred when [she] was still only a little shrimp, float-
ing in the warm embryonic fluid of Ma” (156). However, rather than
lamenting her individual loss, Jane uses her history as a starting point
for the environmental justice activism she gradually develops.
On the whole, when coupled with the sad stories of Mr. Purcell and
Jane herself, the Interlude’s DES evidence strengthens the novel’s
466 I S L E

environmental justice argument. Reviewer Nina Mehta found these

abrupt breaks in the fiction to be “manipulative,” as “doctors and other
experts are paraded through the novel to provide whatever informa-

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tion is deemed necessary at the moment.” While Ozeki’s reliance on re-
search does interrupt the narrative world, the combination of
contextual knowledge and fictional stories that give them a “face” (or a
“body” as it were), makes both more rhetorically effective than either
would be on their own. In what Ulrich Beck terms “risk society,” a state
of modernity characterized by exposure to “toxins and pollutants in
the air, water, and foodstuffs,” threats like the hormones in meat
“generally remain invisible . . . and thus only exist in terms of the (sci-
entific or anti-scientific) knowledge about them” (23). It is this expos-
ure to unseen threats that leaves subjects in risk society “struck by their
own inability to assess danger”: “news of toxic substances in foods,
consumer goods, and so on contain a double shock. The threat itself is
joined by the loss of sovereignty over assessing the dangers” (54).
Ozeki’s narrative structure, with its oscillating fictional and nonfic-
tional modes, works to mitigate that double threat of bodily harm and
powerlessness by offering contextual knowledge that returns some
agency to subjects inundated with toxic shocks. Furthermore, the novel
illustrates the political potential of this rhetorical strategy. The affect
generated by her experience with Mr. Purcell’s family prompts Jane to
do the research that is reported in the Interlude. This research then
informs Jane’s account of her own sad story, which she ultimately uses,
in turn, to inspire viewers of her independent documentary.

From Experience to Representation: Toxic Discourse, Toxic

Bodies
While a combination of experience and research allows Jane to
understand her own sad story in context, Ozeki takes this approach a
step further by having Jane model the translation of experience into a
new mode of representation designed to politically motivate her view-
ers. In contrast to the sentimentalized narrative of wholesome family
values and nostalgic American meat culture that My American Wife
reproduces, Jane’s own documentary film employs a form of what
Lawrence Buell calls “toxic discourse,” which highlights the emotion-
ally powerful imagery of toxic bodies, to represent the hidden story of
violence underlying the meat industry. Furthermore, because the de-
scription of Jane’s documentary footage is juxtaposed with another
Documentary Interlude, this time about the environmental impact of
cattle on the American landscape, the novel is able to connect the bod-
ily assaults of humans and nonhuman animals to the land.
 Environmental Justice Storytelling 467

When Jane travels to Colorado to film an episode for the show, her
encounters at the Dunn family’s industrial feedlot and a local slaugh-
terhouse prompt her to secretly gather footage not just for this com-

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mercial puff piece but also for her own hard-hitting exposé. At the
Dunn feedlot, a CAFO operation housing hundreds of cattle, Jane’s
crew films a “slimy, half-dried puddle” that turns out to be a dead calf,
aborted after an injection of the hormone product Lutalyse (267). This
“misshapen tangle of glistening calf-like parts” has “grotesquely bulg-
ing eyes . . . alive with newly hatched maggots” (267). Subsequently,
Jane dreams that she gives birth to a stillborn calf, a “misshapen tangle
. . . with a dead milky eye . . . alive with maggots” (277). This scene con-
nects the toxic bodies of the feedlot with her own “misshapen” uterus,
also the result of hormonal toxins, linking the horrors arising from the
commodification of meat animals and women’s bodies.
The grotesque findings of Jane’s investigation exemplify Ozeki’s use
of emotionally-charged rhetoric to persuade her audience. Echoing the
visual rhetoric of horror films, but to invoke sympathy for the animals
rather than to entertain, Jane describes how slaughterhouse workers
“used power tools to perform various operations on the hanging
carcasses—lopping off hooves, decapitating, eviscerating—and the
whine of the saw severed the air” (282). In another unsettling descrip-
tion, she likens “skinning a giant carcass” to “peeling the pajamas off a
dozing twelve-foot child” (282).
The documentary’s centerpiece, however, is its disturbing represen-
tation of the contaminated body of a human child. In a brave act of sub-
version Bunny, five-year-old Rose Dunn’s mother, allows Jane to film
her daughter while she sleeps. Although “Rose’s skin was still a baby’s,
milky white and downy” as she sucks her thumb in her sleep, panning
down her form they see two “shockingly full” breasts and follow how
“the baby skin continued, smooth and uninterrupted, down over the
swell of her belly to her public bone, where suddenly, like grotesque
graffiti, her skin was defaced by a wiry tangle of hair” (276). The baby-
ish quality of Rose’s body is starkly juxtaposed to the bodily evidence
of estrogen poisoning she contracted from exposure to DES and other
hormones on the feedlot. This body has been vandalized, her baby skin
“defaced” by a form of toxic “graffiti.” Through depicting Rose in a
documentary eventually aired worldwide, her body becomes public
visual evidence that rewrites this graffiti as a message of political
resistance.
These scenes’ gruesome rhetoric aims not to titillate but to produce
politically-directed affect. Although the resort to melodramatic, over-
the-top language inherently involves simplification, Buell argues for
the “importance of moral melodrama’s . . . totalizing rhetoric” in
468 I S L E

descriptions of “environmental poisoning” (659). Accounts of environ-

mental injustice using “toxic discourse” often rely on a “lurid” “gothic”
rhetoric of “shrill apocalypticism” to “instill shock and compassion in

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uninitiated readers” (662, 43). However, because environmental harm
is notoriously hard to prove, gothic representations of personal experi-
ences with toxicity are “not only conceptually justifiable but socially
indispensible” (661). Cheryl Fish rightly argues that the novel’s “toxic
humor” provides a “counterpoint to the rhetoric of fear and cata-
strophe” of much environmental literature and allows for “subversive
possibilities” (50). However, in crucial scenes like filming Rosie and the
slaughterhouse, a more serious toxic discourse, perhaps equally sub-
versive, seems to dominate.
In fact, the graphicness of toxic discourse engages the audience’s
capacity for sentiment toward other suffering bodies. “The evidence
suggests,” Buell claims, “that the sheer eloquence—the affect—of testi-
mony of ordinary citizens’ anxiety about environmental degradation
can have substantial influence on public policy, especially when the
media are watching” (662). Indeed, the novel models this process as
Jane translates graphic images of toxic bodies into an affective visual
toxic discourse—her independent documentary.
Yet the novel’s formal juxtaposition of environmental research and
images of corporeal trauma implies that gothic testimonies of bodily
harm may not be sufficient. Buell proposes the “potency” and “felt
urgency” of toxic discourse, which operates “in excess of the facts,” as
a necessary alternative to the “deliberate pace and methodological ra-
tionalism of scientific and legal” discourse (48). However, the novel
suggests that combining the “potency” of individual toxic stories with
the context of environmental “facts” might retain that crucial affective
power without losing rationalism. A case in point, the adjacent
Documentary Interlude links the scene’s bodily violence with informa-
tion about the cattle industry’s violence against land. Outlining the en-
vironmental impacts, from desertification to water contamination, of
the cattle industry, Jane’s interlude notes ironically that despite their
iconic status “cattle are destroying the West” and have already
degraded 85 percent of its rangeland according to a UN report cited in
the text (249). The Environmental historian Philip Fradkin, quoted in
the Interlude, claims that cattle have “done more to alter the type of
vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip
mines, power plants, freeways and sub-division developments
combined” (249).
By providing this contextual information, Ozeki implies that one
cannot understand the stories of people like Rosie without recognizing
their link to the industrial food chain and its production of
 Environmental Justice Storytelling 469

environmental injustices. Unlike most artistic narratives of DES, points

out Julie Sze, Ozeki’s traces its use in both women and nonhuman ani-
mals (800). This allows Ozeki to expose the corporate ideology that

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underlies abuses to women and animals, as well as to explore the his-
torical characterization of women, especially women of color, as
“chattel.” That word, Ozeki notes in an essay, “shares its origin with
‘cattle’ and ‘capital,’ thereby exposing the very root of our capitalist ety-
mology. The stock market is named for the livestock traded there. Wall
Street was an abattoir” (“My Year”).4 If we start with the “fleshy”
body, she argues, we “can see how, once commodified, it transmogri-
fies so easily from temple into meat, whereby women become cows
and wives become chattel” (“My Year”). By relating women and chat-
tel, and redefining Wall Street as a slaughterhouse, Ozeki links the
ruthless pursuit of capitalist profits with the oppression of marginal-
ized human/nonhuman bodies seen in the documentary.
While pointing to the social construction of women and animals
through discourses of nature, race, gender, and food, the novel also
emphasizes the inescapable materiality of the bodies involved, and
hence aligns itself with a new materialist approach to feminist environ-
mental justice concern.5 By foregrounding toxic bodies and the
“material interchanges between bodies (both human and nonhuman)
and the wider environment,” Ozeki’s novel becomes an apt example of
Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “trans-corporeality” (16). For Alaimo,
“imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality” involves a
“thinking across bodies” and a recognition that the “human is always
intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (2).
Examining toxic bodies in particular, according to this approach,
highlights the stakes involved since it “encourages us to imagine our-
selves in constant interchange with the environment” and thereby
“may render it nearly impossible for humans to imagine that our own
well-being is disconnected from that of the rest of the planet or to im-
agine that it is possible to protect ‘nature’ by merely creating separate,
distinct areas in which it is ‘preserved’” (22, 18).6 Indeed, failing to rec-
ognize our trans-corporeality can result in materially harmful forms of
denial, as when Rose’s family figured her body as innocent, pristine
space, not recognizing the dangers of her physical proximity to agricul-
tural chemicals. In the end, her unexpectedly contaminated body
becomes a key example of what Buell calls the “disrupted pastoral,” a
prominent trope of toxic discourse (37).
While toxic discourse can potentially reinscribe “the polarization of
saved versus damned,” Buell notes, it may also refigure humanity’s re-
lation to environment from “solitary escapee” (preservation) or
“consumer” (conservation) to one based on “collectivities with no
470 I S L E

alternative but to cooperate in acknowledgement of their like-it-or-not

interdependence” (44, 53). In fact, the novel avoids the savior complex
by showing Jane not just giving a “slum tour” of toxic bodies but link-

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ing this toxicity to larger structural forces in the Documentary
Interludes–prompting recognition of her audience’s “like-it-or-not
interdependence.” Moreover, the novel’s form encourages us not just
to feel sorry for Rosie, but, like Jane, to use that sentiment to motivate
action. If sentimental literature is often criticized for enabling readers’
catharsis without necessitating intervention and for concealing larger
oppressive structures, My Year of Meats answers these critiques not
only by demonstrating the political action enabled through contextual-
ized toxic discourse, but also by embedding those narratives in a self-
conscious discussion of the rhetorical and epistemic functions of
storytelling.

Ignorance and Imagination: Telling Self-Conscious Stories

While contextualizing stories of environmental injustice, Ozeki’s
novel also suggests that awareness of how storytelling shapes environ-
mental knowledge and ignorance is crucial to enabling political action.
At issue is how we can tell environmental stories that, in Nixon’s
words, are “dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant
political intervention” given what Ozeki calls “the general glut of bad
news over which we, as citizens, have so little control” (3, 334). To do
this, the novel suggests that we need to examine the relationship be-
tween public denial and representation head on so that we can disman-
tle the environmental ignorance that often prevents ethical awareness.
As a result of the stories they tell and consume, both the characters
and their society at large struggle with a form of denial that Jane
describes as a “massive cultural trend” (334). For instance, though
aware of Rosie’s deformity, Bunny represses its link to the family busi-
ness, finally admitting after seeing Jane’s documentary that “things
you’d never even believe could ever happen just start seemin’ as nor-
mal as pie” (295). Similarly, Jane confesses that she both cared and
“couldn’t afford to care” about the meat industry’s “unsavory side”
and that “these two contrary states lived side by side like twins,
wrapped in a numbing cocoon that enabled me to get the work done”
(176).
Philosopher Nancy Williams calls this type of willful repression
“affected ignorance,” or the “phenomenon of people choosing not to
investigate whether some practice in which they participate might be
immoral or rife with controversy” (371). Similarly, Jane defines
“ignorance” not as a passive circumstance but as “an act of will, a
 Environmental Justice Storytelling 471

choice that one makes over and over again” (334). “Knowledge about
factory farming systems and animal suffering is knowledge most peo-
ple do not want to have,” argues Williams, because we fear confronting

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our own complicity (377). Thus affected ignorance is, paradoxically, a
“delicate form of knowledge,” a type of ignorance “generated by what
one already knows” (378). Indeed, Jane admits the information in the
Documentary Interludes is “widely available,” but that people “don’t
want to hear it” (334), and Ozeki herself has said that she “dreaded the
knowledge” her research for the novel would uncover (“My Year”). In
a society inundated with information, affected ignorance becomes a
survival strategy that can lead to political inertia. “Coming at us like
this—in waves, massed and unbreachable—knowledge becomes sym-
bolic of our disempowerment—becomes bad knowledge” so that we
suppress it, Jane notes, “riding its crest until it subsides from con-
sciousness” (334). Against the conventional wisdom that knowledge is
power, Jane defines “bad knowledge” as disempowering. Conversely,
if we “can’t act on knowledge,” then “ignorance becomes empow-
ering” because it enables people to “survive” (334).
This phenomenon of affected ignorance as a response to “bad
knowledge” is at the heart of the novel’s self-conscious investigation of
ethical environmental storytelling. In a recent interview, Ozeki
describes a similar concept, “agnotology,” as both the “willful con-
struction of ignorance” through a “kind of [deceptive] tale-telling”
(like the “tobacco industry falsifying information to create ignorance”),
and the “black holes in our knowledge and memory” created “by just
neglecting to tell the tale” (Ty interview 170). Coined by history of sci-
ence scholar Robert Proctor to describe the “cultural production of
ignorance” and “its study,” agnotology figures ignorance not simply as
a “vacuum or hollow space into which knowledge is pulled,” but as a
complicated phenomenon deserving of its own study alongside epis-
temology (5). This study includes considering the “conscious, uncon-
scious, and structural production of ignorance,” and whether it is
“brought about by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction, secrecy,
or suppression” (3).
Approaching ignorance as an actively constructed presence, instead
of a passive absence, Ozeki’s novel self-consciously ponders how stories
produce affected ignorance and how we can “tell tales” that combat en-
vironmental ignorance and produce actionable knowledge. At issue in
the novel is not just “what” we know, but “how” what we know can be
either repressed or activated through the telling of stories. In address-
ing environmental problems, the novel suggests, we need to think not
only about the issues themselves, but also about how the way tales are
told, who tells them, and who benefits affects marginalized bodies and
472 I S L E

environments. Since affected ignorance benefits corporate powers like

BEEF-EX and legitimates violence against female/raced bodies and the
environment, its construction through stories becomes a crucial envir-

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onmental justice issue.
Contrasting the novel’s own happy ending with that of My
American Wife’s Dunn episode highlights this crucial relation between
environmental storytelling and affected ignorance. After heavy corpor-
ate editing of Jane’s footage, the Dunn episode ends by representing
Rosie as a “normal as pie” farm girl in picturesque Colorado with
parents who “look on approvingly as the knowledge and traditions of
the American West” are passed on (261). Thus, while Jane’s documen-
tary emphasizes Rosie’s disturbingly toxic body, the show’s story
achieves its happy ending by concealing and distorting the bodily and
environmental impacts of feedlot practices—hence perpetuating, even
actively constructing, environmental ignorance. Ozeki not only con-
demns the practices of the Dunn feedlot, but draws attention to how
storytelling more broadly can repress or reveal complicity in (environ-
mental) injustice. From this perspective, the novel becomes a take on
what Ursula Heise calls a “risk-theoretical approach to narrative” that
analyzes how “rhetorical traditions filter and shape information about
risk” (139). While, as Heise claims, the familiarity of certain narrative
modes may artificially inflate the dangers of some toxic stories, Ozeki
shows that other narrative strategies, particularly those designed for
commercial gain (like My American Wife’s), may work to repress our
perception of risk. In either circumstance a lack of awareness about
how narratives shape risk perceptions can create a form of ignorance
with real environmental consequences.
In contrast to the ending of the Dunn episode, the novel’s own delib-
erately self-conscious ending aims to reveal, rather than conceal, its
narrative construction and sociopolitical effects. Though many injusti-
ces remain unresolved at the novel’s close, Jane purposely writes a
happy ending that focuses on the success of her documentary, the glo-
bal attention it brings to growth hormones, and the emerging coalition
of women it inspires to oppose meat industry deceptions. Reflecting on
the ending’s form and function, Jane admits happy endings are “too
easy and not so interesting,” and that though she may not be able to
“change [her] future simply by writing a happy ending,” she will
“certainly do [her] best to imagine one” (361). When asked about this
ending, Ozeki acknowledged that, like Jane, she is “suspicious” of
happy endings but that “by having Jane discuss the shortcomings of
happy endings right smack in the middle of one, [she] was hoping to
invite the reader into a more complex relationship with that ending”
(“A Conversation” 13). Seeing such an ending as a necessary strategy
 Environmental Justice Storytelling 473

for political change, Ozeki insists that “the first step toward change
depends on the imagination’s ability to perform this radical act of
faith” (13).

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The novel’s self-reflexive ending combats ignorance by providing
hopeful closure while acknowledging that in real life such hope is con-
tingent on our continued political action. In Ozeki’s words, this ap-
proach “frees the intellect to continue its trajectory beyond the story
line, pondering the issues the book raises,” a crucial function given that
“without the power of the imagination we lack the power to alter out-
comes” (13). By simultaneously imagining change and reflecting on
the act of imagining change, the novel inspires readers not through
providing an uncomplicated sentimental conclusion, but through a
self-consciousness that invites readers to “open up” their imaginations
to the world outside the novel and thereby combat environmental ig-
norance.7 To reinforce this strategy, Ozeki includes a bibliography of
references after the ending—including texts on meat production, fac-
tory farming, and the health effects of DES, as well as contact informa-
tion and websites for advocacy organizations. Thus, the author’s
uncommon ending seeks not only to inspire her readers, but also to ex-
plicitly point them to resources for continued understanding and ac-
tion. Rather than diluting the “truth” of environmental fact, novels like
Ozeki’s demonstrate how literature can “lend new forms of informa-
tion an affective and ethical content” (Palumbo-Liu 64). If Ozeki’s “bad
knowledge” is knowledge we feel powerless to react to and therefore
suppress, this novel seeks to create “good knowledge” by modeling
strategies of responding to “bad news” that promote political change
and critical thinking rather than paralysis and denial.
As environmentalists, we face perhaps as great a public “belief gap”
or “behavior gap” as a “knowledge gap” around environmental issues.
It behooves us, then, to consider not only how to best gather more en-
vironmental data, but also how cultural forms of ignorance are actively
created, and can be self-consciously dismantled, by the stories we tell.
Ozeki’s novel, I argue, demonstrates the rhetorical value of literature
that combines the data-driven analysis of the sciences with the im-
aginative, affect-producing work of fiction for encouraging the critical
awareness that enables political action, and, in doing so, illustrates the
necessity of reconsidering how narratives “document” the relationship
between marginalized bodies and environmental degradation. My
Year of Meats’ unusual narrative structure offers a model of how litera-
ture can both communicate science, by using its affective power to give
facts the emotional force that brings about change, and deploy senti-
mental rhetorical strategies while avoiding the pitfalls of sentimental
fiction. Indeed, self-reflexive modes of storytelling that activate
474 I S L E

emotional frames while providing contextualized environmental

information—whether about climate change or factory farming—may
be especially effective for helping audiences understand urgent prob-

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lems of environmental injustice.

NOTES

1. Jane is represented as both the narrator and “author” of the novel,

describing it as a “work of my imagination” and signing “J.T.-L” after her
“Author’s Note.”
2. DES daughters, as Jane mentions, suffered from cancer, infertility, and
structural mutations of sexual organs. Sons developed mutations of the tes-
ticles, testicular cancer and infertility (126).
3. Robert Verchick cites several studies that demonstrate the particular en-
vironmental dangers women face, arguing that the risk assessment models
used by government agencies do not take this difference into account (70).
4. The Fort Worth Stockyard is still known as the “Wall Street of the West”
for its once large role in the US economy.
5. Given Western thought’s damaging association of women with nature,
notes Stacy Alaimo, “most feminist theory has worked to disentangle woman
from nature” (3) Though possessing great “explanatory and polemical force,”
this work has resulted in a “tremendous outpouring of feminist theory and
cultural studies” that, while about “the body,” tends to “focus exclusively on
how various bodies have been discursively produced” (3).
6. This emphasis on the porosity of human (and all) bodies is a key idea in
the conception of toxic corporeality. Ursula Heise identifies chemical pollution
as a “crucial trope” through which narratives “explore the porous boundaries
between body and environment” (161). Nancy Tuana’s notion of “viscous
porosity,” in which our bodily porosity is mediated by various physical, cul-
tural, and political membranes, also offers a useful model of the
environmentally-situated body (199).
7. Moreover, unlike Faye Halpern’s theory that “sentimental rhetoric’s ef-
fectiveness depends on our forgetting how crafted it is,” on our perception of
it as “a spontaneous outpouring of emotion” (53), Ozeki’s approach explicitly
points to its own craftedness, suggesting that our accurate interpretation of
the moral content of stories requires paying conscious attention to how stories
activate our neural emotional frames and to what ends.

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