The Limits of Romancing Food in the Neoliberal Era: Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
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.
Abstract
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.
참고문헌 (31)
- Adams, Carol J, "The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory" (2000), Continuum
- Barber, Dan, "The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food" (2015), Penguin
- Bennett, Jane, "Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things" (2011), Duke UP
- Bogost, Ian, "Alien Phenomenology: Or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing" (2012), U of Minnesota P
- Carruth, Allison, "Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food" (2013), Cambridge UP
- Cheng, Emily, "Meat and the Millennium", JAAS: The Journal of Asian American Studies, 12(2), pp.191~220 (2009)
- Chiu, Monica, "Postnational Globalization and (En)gendered Meat Production in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats", LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 12(1), pp.99~128 (2008)
- Coole, Diana H, "New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics" (2010), Duke UP
- Eckes, Alfred E, "Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century" (2003), Cambridge UP
- Fish, Cheryl J, "The Toxic Body Politic: Ethnicity, Gender, and Corrective Eco-Justice in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold’s Blue Vinyl", Ethnicity and Ecocriticism. Spec. issue of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 34(2), pp.43~62 (2009)
- Jameson, Fredric, "Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1991), Duke UP
- Kingsolver, Barbara, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" (2008), Harper Collins
- Marsh, John M, "Japanese Import Demand for U.S. Beef and Pork: Effects on U.S. Red Meat Export and Livestock Prices", Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, 34(3), pp.501~512 (2002)
- McMichael, Philip, "Global Food Politics", Monthly Review, 50(3), pp.97~111 (1998)
- McMichael, Philip, "The Power of Food", Agriculture and Human Values, 17(1), pp.21~33 (2000)
- McMichael, Philip, "The World Food Crisis in Historical Perspective", Monthly Review, 61(3), pp.32~47 (2009)
- Milne Leah, "Hybrid Vigor’: The Pillow Book and Collaborative Authorship in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats", College Literature, 42(3), pp.464~487 (2015)
- Mol, Annemarie, "I Eat an Apple. On Theorizing Subjectivities", Subjectivity: International Journal of Critical Psychology, 22(1), pp.28~37 (2008)
- Lavin, Chad, "Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics" (2013), U of Minnesota P
- Ozeki, Ruth L, "My Year of Meats" (1998), Penguin
- Palumbo-Liu, David, "Minor Transnationalism" (2005), Duke UP
- Pollan, Michael, "The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" (2007), Penguin
- Probyn, Elspeth, "Carnal Appetites: Foodsexidentities" (2000), Routledge
- Schlosser, Eric, "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal" (2002), Harper Collins
- Shiva, Vandana, "Globalizing Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1999", pp.98~108 (2003), Oxford UP
- Sinclair, Upton, "The Jungle" (2010), Wilder Publications
- The Global Social Crisis: Report on the World Social Situation 2011, "United Nations", United Nations, ~ (2011)
- Young, James Harvey, "Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906" (1989), Princeton UP