Both Ruth L. Ozeki, the author of My Year of Meats, and Timothy Pachirat, the author of A Politics of Sight use ideas to promote political and social change in society. Both of the authors create this political and social change through the use of different techniques such concealment in society and points of view, in an attempt to convince the readers of the negative consequences of the meat industry and how not monitoring it can prove to have many negative consequences. Ruth L. Ozeki uses concealment and visibility in the television industry to convince readers of the negative implications of hiding away the gruesome meat industry. Throughout the novel, the author uses examples of how corrupt the meat industry is and how it only focuses …show more content…
on the profits instead of the society’s health, “There’s this one pig farmer in Kansas who ran his pregnant sows underneath his finishing pens? You know what he saved in feed costs? About ten thousand dollars a year” (Ozeki). Through this statement it is shown that the farmers in the United States do not care about the health of society and instead the only thing that matters to them is profits and thus having negative consequences on society. Ozeki also uses facts that the character, Jane, learns throughout the novel My Year Of Meats to teach the reader of the negative outcomes of focusing on the producer and not the consumer. An example of when this occurs in the text is when the character Jane talks about the chemical DES (diethylstilbestrol), “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.” Due to the lack of clarity and visibility within the United States meat industry, the hormone DES negatively impacted a vast majority of the children that were born during the early 20th century, “recommending the drug … to produce ‘bigger and stronger babies.’ Many doctors prescribed it as … a vitamin, to an estimated five million women … despite evidence … that hormone manipulation during pregnancy was dangerous.” Another attempt by Ozeki to promote political and social change is during the scenes in the novel where Jane is at a meat packing plant and learns about all of the hormones going into the meat, “Trace residues of these drugs end up in the beef we eat, along with concentrated doses of herbicides used in cattle feed, and pesticides and insecticides…” This insight into the meat packing facility furthers the reader’s knowledge and assumptions of the aspects of concealing the meat packing industry and the negative consequences it has on the public. While Ozeki uses characterization to describe concealment and visibility, Pachirat uses a different technique to address the issue. Pachirat entertains the topic of concealment and visibility through sequestration in slaughterhouses to force readers to explore the idea of how society hides away distasteful actions and why. Pachirat argues that in the slaughterhouse, concealment allows for the lack of “food safety and humane handling violations” (Pachirat 234) and that this lack of safety inside the slaughterhouse is due to the ignorance of the society. Without this ignorance, Pachirat argues that the conditions inside of the slaughterhouse would be prevented through “our disgust, our horror, our pity and the political action these reactions engender” (247) and thus, the segregation between the slaughterhouse and the society would be lost. With the loss of the segregation between consumers and producers, society would be forced to change the way that industries operate, “under our gaze, they will wither and shrivel up,” (247) and thus resulting in political action within society that would change how brutally we slaughter animals and the corruption within the slaughterhouses. Pachirat uses the idea of “zones of confinement,” (240) divisions that segregate the society and the slaughterhouse, to illustrate the idea of how consumers are separate from the people who produce the goods, “zones of confinement … beginning with the slaughterhouse and the society at large” (240). It is implied through this point that with sequestration between society and industries such as the slaughterhouses, society becomes ignorant of the true horrors going on behind closed doors. This in turn negatively affects society by allowing the corruption in the meat industry to go on unrestricted and unmaintained. Pachirat explains that through the process of civilizing people within nations, society has been trained to provoke reactions of disgust toward things that have been hidden and are too distasteful to contemplate. This idea of production being concealed from the public, and thus causing a consumer society that has no relationship to the production, is solidified with the contrast between Anarres, “Workshops and factories fronted on squares or on their open yards, and their doors were open.” (244) and Urras, “… the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls,”(244) through the eyes of the fictional character Shevek. The importance of this contrast between the two planets demonstrates Pachirat’s argument of how the segregation between the producer and the consumer creates a society where there is the ability for corruption to take place and flourish without the knowledge of society. Both Ozeki and Pachirat contemplate the same idea that we need to make visible what is hidden to create political and social change; however, both of these authors do so in an interestingly different way.
The author of My Year Of Meats, Ruth L. Ozeki talks about concealment through the perspective of hormones that are put into the meat and the negative aspects that concealing the beef industry has on society. Pachirat argues that concealment through the brutality and corruption of slaughterhouses in the United States and how ignorant society is of the true horrors going on behind the walls of the slaughterhouses. Both of these authors are approaching the same goal of trying to make a political change in the way society runs but both of them do so through different ideas and techniques. Both of these techniques are equally as effective when forcing the reader to consider the negative consequences of trusting the meat industry that is so cleverly concealed from the sight of society. It is these ideas and implications that make the texts important to make a shift in society and what may result in a political change such as one that happened in Chicago in the …show more content…
1900s. In the novel My Year of Meats, Ozeki constantly switches between two different points of view and this helps the reader to understand both sides of the rampant beef situation. While one of the characters, Jane, is on the know-all side of the situation, “Having said this, however, there is evidence that hormones in the environment, including those used in meat production, may contribute to the overall decline in fertility rates,” Akiko, her Japanese counterpart, is often on the unlucky side; “There were several long words—“unsavory,” “sterility,” “impotence”—that Akiko didn’t understand” (Ozeki). The author uses this contrast between the two characters to allow the reader to examine closely just how much the world does not know about some of the practices that are going on in countries such as America. This allows the readers to contemplate the idea of how little is known about the meat industry and come to the realization that political change is needed in order to bring clarity to the issue of the meat industry. By using a changing point of view, Ozeki allows readers to feel deep empathy towards Akiko since her character has no idea of any of the events going on, on the other side of the planet. This empathy allows Ozeki to further her political intentions by forcing the reader to contemplate how much they actually know about the meat industry and the negative consequences of societies ignorance. The negative implications that can arise from trusting the meat industry are highlighted in Ozeki’s choice of what each character knows and how they interpret the world around them. However, Pachirat highlights these negative consequences through a different technique, which is his own point of view. Timothy Pachirat uses his own point of view to write the essay, A Politics of Sight, and at the beginning of it states: “I am a researcher interested in writing an account of industrialized slaughter from the perspective of those who carry it out” (Pachirat 234). and it is from this moment that Pachirat introduces his first person point of view on the inside of the slaughterhouse. The point of view Pachirat uses is important when readers think about the implications it has on the essay he has written and allows the readers to trust the author more than normal. The point of view of Timothy Pachirat recalls all of the details of the slaughterhouse that he worked in and, as a result, the reader knows that there can be trust placed in the author-reader relationship. From there, Pachirat uses the point of view to give the readers a life-like glance at the industry itself, starting with the “simultaneous concealment (of food safety and humane handling violations) and surveillance (of kill floor workers)” (234). Through this quotation, Pachirat uses the point of view to gain the trust of the reader to forward ideas of the negative consequences of not monitoring the meat industry. After Pachirat convinces the readers of the negative implications of ignoring the meat industry he uses his point of view to further the idea of political and social change within the meat industry. Both Ozeki and Pachirat use point of view to get the reader to contemplate the consequences of not monitoring the meat industry in order to further their ideas of societal change. However, they both use this technique in vastly different ways. Ozeki attempts to seek empathy from the readers and forces readers to question their ignorance in order to drive across the point of how not monitoring the meat industry can negatively affect the well-being of the people who live in it. While Pachirat uses a technique that forces the readers to trust him from the beginning of the narration, Pachirat then uses this trust to force the readers into a thought-provoking spiral of corruption by the meat industry. Both of these authors use point of view in order to hook the reader into the idea of negativity towards the meat industry and the corruption that goes on but in very interestingly different ways. The methods used by the authors are both equally as effective and both highlight different issues on why society needs clarity when dealing with things such as the meat industry. Even though Ozeki, author of My Year of Meat’s and Pachirat, author of A Politics of Sight, force the reader to think about the same topic; the negative implications of trusting the meat industry without sight into what goes on and the political change that can arise with that sight.
They both use different techniques in order to attempt to get the reader to think about these ideas, both of them use an idea of concealment and point of view however they use different techniques in order get the reader to think about how much they actually know about the topic. The importance of society maintaining visibility and clarity when it comes to issues such as the corruption and hormone mismanagement within slaughterhouses is an idea that is highlighted by both texts and used to further the idea of societal, both political and social,
change.
The argumentative article “More Pros than Cons in a Meat-Free Life” authored by Marjorie Lee Garretson was published in the student newspaper of the University of Mississippi in April 2010. In Garretson’s article, she said that a vegetarian lifestyle is the healthy life choice and how many people don’t know how the environment is affected by their eating habits. She argues how the animal factory farms mistreat the animals in an inhumane way in order to be sources of food. Although, she did not really achieve the aim she wants it for this article, she did not do a good job in trying to convince most of the readers to become vegetarian because of her writing style and the lack of information of vegetarian
Food Inc. addresses many political issues during the film to draw in the audience. Issues such as: the environment, education, workers’ rights, health care, climate change, energy control, to name a few. Director Robert Kenner exposes secrets about the foods society eats, where the food has come from and the processes the food went through. It is these issues that are used as politics of affect in both an extreme visual representation and a strong audio representation that has the biggest impact on the audience and their connection to what they are being told. This paper aims to discuss the film Food Inc. and the propaganda message for positive change, as well as, the differences between seeing food and deciding...
Gabriel Kolko is one of American historians and authors. He wrote a book named “The Triumph of Conservatism: A Re-interpretation of American History, 1900-1916”, and “Meat Inspection: Theory and Reality” is an article in that book. It introduced about Meat Inspection Act in Progressive Era: the main reasoned why it happened, how it affected on legislation, and how government- especially president Roosevelt- executed the new law. Through this article, Kolko also showed his opinion about supporting “free market” and condemning “political capitalism”.
These were only some of many examples in The Jungle about deceit and corruption exhibited in the meat packing industry. Nonetheless, plants had government inspectors to check for tubercular animals, but Sinclair explains that these inspectors were usually the kind of people who would be easily distracted by those passing, and would not regret missing dozens of other animals. Therefore, people’s faith in those government inspectors had been betrayed, and their health needs were relentlessly ignored. However, Sinclair’s exposing of the scheming meat packing industry increased the awareness of such practices occurring daily.
...es of cattle, which resulted in the increase of suicidal reports. Slaughterhouses and meatpacking companies have amplified the amount of cattle slaughtered each hour to fulfill the amount of meat consumed in the United States due to the cause of fast food. The damage that fast food had placed on illegal immigrant workers and sanitary workers that are employed in slaughterhouses are as much as murdering the men and women, minute by minute. The growth of fast food is too fast for our voices to be heard and fast food had implemented too much innovation in agriculture today for us to fix. We can still change the society that we live in today, as long as we withdraw our arrogant and selfish thoughts on fast food and think of ways to improve and recover what the fast food industry had done.
Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner?” (Steiner 845). With these questions the author tries to hook up his audience and make them think about how and where does everyday meat comes from.
Muckraking the Meat-Packing Industry. " Constitutional Rights Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. The Web. The Web. 11 Mar. 2014.
At the turn of the twentieth century “Muckraking” had become a very popular practice. This was where “muckrakers” would bring major problems to the publics attention. One of the most powerful pieces done by a muckraker was the book “The Jungle”, by Upton Sinclair. The book was written to show the horrible working and living conditions in the packing towns of Chicago, but what caused a major controversy was the filth that was going into Americas meat. As Sinclair later said in an interview about the book “I aimed at the publics heart and by accident hit them in the stomach.”# The meat packing industry took no responsibility for producing safe and sanitary meat.
In the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, the author talks about, not only vegetarianism, but reveals to us what actually occurs in the factory farming system. The issue circulating in this book is whether to eat meat or not to eat meat. Foer, however, never tries to convert his reader to become vegetarians but rather to inform them with information so they can respond with better judgment. Eating meat has been a thing that majority of us engage in without question. Which is why among other reasons Foer feels compelled to share his findings about where our meat come from. Throughout the book, he gives vivid accounts of the dreadful conditions factory farmed animals endure on a daily basis. For this reason Foer urges us to take a stand against factory farming, and if we must eat meat then we must adapt humane agricultural methods for meat production.
Olson, Kirby. "Gregory Corso's Post-Vegetarian Ethical Dilemma.(Gregory Corso)(Essay)." Journal Of Comparative Literature And Aesthetics 1-2 (2004): 53. Academic OneFile. Web. 4 Dec. 2013.
“If you live in a free market and a free society, shouldn’t you have the right to know what you’re buying? It’s shocking that we don’t and it’s shocking how much is kept from us” (Kenner). For years, the American public has been in the dark about the conditions under which the meat on their plate was produced. The movie, Food Inc. uncovers the harsh truths about the food industry. This shows that muckraking is still an effective means of creating change as shown by Robert Kenner’s movie, Food Inc. and the reforms to the food industry that followed its release.
However, Hare’s pro demi-vegetarian argument provides an unequivocal view on the discussion of economic, ecological, and moral topics. While the look into market trends of meat is lacking Hare discusses a reality of the meat industry and its food competitors, that being the cost behind animal rearing and husbandry. While the high costs incurred does not entail permissibility the surrounding circumstances do. If fodder is grown on terrain only suitable for a pasture, then as a result husbandry and animal domestication (and later slaughter) is permissible because the economic consequences of harvesting crops would greatly outweigh the benefits and as such the community improves more from the meat/animal byproduct industry. This economical and ecological argument is one of several that Hare provides in his article Why I Am Only A Demi-Vegetarian, in addition to the market term being coined and reasoning behind
...hen rules and the enforcement of them in the meatpacking industry and slaughterhouses. However, Schlosser disregards to provide a solution. He simply points the finger and leaves the reader depressed, without means or logic to correct the situation. After reading, we enthusiastically agreed with Schlosser when he pulled on our emotional series. His logic was also substantial in this chapter with his thorough research and extensive truthful support. However, because he does not offer any solution to the problem, it diminished significantly from his argument. Although Schlosser's argument cannot be labeled an attack, in our minds, it certainly became nothing short of an overly emotional, well-jointed rage. Schlosser uses these numbers to show the errors of certain meat packing companies and in turn, how this has caused massive illness and injury to the general public.
“The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that their treatment has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality."(Schopenhauer). I always wondered why some people are not so drawn to the consumption of meat and fed up with only one thought about it. Why so many people loathe of blood, and why so few people can easily kill and be slaughter animal, until they just get used to it? This reaction should say something about the most important moments in the code, which was programmed in the human psyche. Realization the necessity of refraining from meat is especially difficult because people consume it for a long time, and in addition, there is a certain attitude to the meat as to the product that is useful, nourishing and even prestigious. On the other hand, the constant consumption of meat has made the vast majority of people completely emotionless towards it. However, there must be some real and strong reasons for refusal of consumption of meat and as I noticed they were always completely different. So, even though vegetarianism has evolved drastically over time, some of its current forms have come back full circle to resemble that of its roots, when vegetarianism was an ethical-philosophical choice, not merely a matter of personal health.
As we can now observe, vegetarianism has become something fashionable, and the number of people who reject eating meat is constantly increasing. In Britain, for instance, over 5 million people have done it so far. It is obviously connected with the recent animal diseases, but this tendency is likely to spread on the other regions of the world. However, it is not only a fashion or fear of illnesses. I myself became a vegetarian about 2 years ago, and I can see a number of reasons why people should stop eating meat. They are mainly of ethic, economic and health type. Those who think in an ecological way should also be aware of how this meat consumption ruins our environment. I don’t have an intention to force anybody to become a vegetarian, but I hope that my argumentation would be strong enough to make some people think about it, at least. In this essay I will try to present this point of view, expressing my personal feelings and showing scientific facts about the problem.