“Yes, ma’am.”
“What do you ... Do you eat vegetables of some kind?”
“Yes.”
“Like ... collard greens?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And anything else? Like ... corn bread?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It was a guessing game, but my preconceived notions of Southern cooking were limited by what was available on the menus of country-style, home-cooking restaurants in SoHo, and I was running out of suggestions.
“Uh, anything else? Do you eat anything else?”
“Hog maws,” offered Mr. Purcell.
Ueno snorted. He was sitting back in his chair, arms crossed, retracted back into his impassive Japanese businessman persona. He was making me very nervous.
“How about other meats?” he asked. “You like another kind meats too?”
“Chicken,” Mr. Purcell said. “We sure do like chicken, but even chicken ain’t cheap now. Used to be they had these parts that was real good. And cheap down at the packin’ house ...”
Miss Helen let out a hiccup that turned into a burst of laughter.
“Yeah, we thought they was real good ... until Mr. Purcell’s barrytone came out soundin’ serpraner!”
Ueno looked at me questioningly, but I didn’t get it, either.
Purcell explained. “It was some medicines they was usin’ in the chickens that got into the necks that we was eatin’.... An’ that medicine, well, if it didn’t start to make me sound just like a woman!”
“And look just like one too, with them teeny little titties and everything!” Miss Helen chimed in.
I still didn’t get it, but Ueno cut them off with another snort. He leaned forward.
“What about beef? You like beef?”
Miss Helen looked up in surprise. “Oh, no, sir.”
“No? But why you don’t like it? Steak is most delicious.”
Purcell shrugged. “You got kids?” he asked. Ueno stiffened slightly and shook his head. “Red meat’s too costly with so many mouths to feed,” explained Purcell apologetically.
“We get hamburger sometimes,” offered Miss Helen.
“That’s right, we do. Miss Helen’ll fry up some for the kids ever so often. But to my mind red meat ain’t half so tasty as white....” Mr. Purcell’s voice trailed off into silence.
Ueno sat back and I wrapped up the interview as quickly as I could. I waited for Ueno to say something, but he kept quiet. We had dinner with the family while the neighbors gathered, and then the softball game got under way. Ueno didn’t eat much, or say much. After the meal, he played a few innings and even scored a hit off of Miss Helen, although I suspected she let him. But the whole time, I was worried. I didn’t trust him one bit.
“We’ll be back,” I said loudly, for Ueno’s benefit, as we got ready to leave. “We’ll see you again, soon.” Miss Helen walked us to the car and hugged first Ueno, then me.
“I gotta confess I was nervous at first,” she said softly, holding on to my hands. “We never met no Japanese people before and we didn’t know what kind of folks you’d turn out to be. But we’re all real glad you came. We’re lookin’ forward to when you come back with the camera.”
Mr. Purcell shook Ueno’s hand, pumping it up and down like he was priming a well.
We got in the car and backed down the driveway. As we drove away from Harmony, Ueno pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his hands. The tension in the car started to build. Ueno dropped the ax at the Tennessee border.
“I have decided you must make program about the Thayer family.”
Of course. I had been expecting this.
“Why?!” I exploded. “That is absolutely insane. The Dawes are wonderful. They’re perfect. It took them a while to warm up, but you’ll never get a more interesting show than that. The Thayers have nothing, there’s no comparison. Think about the church! How can you even consider not filming there, after what you went through today?”
“It’s not about me. It’s a question of meats.”
“What about the meats?”
“Mrs. Becky Thayers has better meats. She has beautiful beef.”
“But I thought ‘Pork is Possible!’ ”
“Yes, but ‘Beef is Best!’ And as you know, chitterling is not pork, Takagi. It is the intestine of pig. My American Wife! is for Japanese people, not for Koreans or black peoples.”
“You racist bastard.”
He turned and stared at me, narrowing his eyes. “I didn’t make up rules. This is U.S.-sponsor show and U.S.-sponsor instruction.” He looked away again, at the brilliant green curtains of kudzu draping the trees and spilling down the berm by the side of the road. He folded his arms across his chest.
“Meat is the message, Takagi,” he said, surveying the landscape with a grim air of accomplishment. “If you cannot learn this, you cannot be director for my program. That is all I will say.”
6.
The Water Month
SHŌNAGON
The Way in Which Carpenters Eat
The way in which carpenters eat is really odd. When they had finished the main building and were working on the eastern wing, some carpenters squatted in a row to have their meal; I sat on the verandah and watched them. The moment the food was brought, they fell on the soup bowls and gulped down the contents. Then they pushed the bowls aside and finished off all the vegetables. I wondered whether they were going to leave their rice; a moment later there wasn’t a grain left in the bowls.4 They all behaved in exactly the same way, so I suppose this must be the custom of carpenters. I should not call it a very charming one.
JANE
Anyone who travels around the sprawling heartland of this country must at some point wonder why Americans are so uniformly obese. Are we all so ignorant about diet and health? Or so greedy, or so terrified of famine that we continuously, and almost unconsciously, stockpile body fat? Or is there something else? These are the questions that Suzuki and Oh would ask me, confronted with yet another bleeding steak the size of a manhole cover, spilling over the sides of the plate. And the potato, stuffed with butter and sour cream? Why both? they would cry in dismay.
I am not fat, but my tallness amounts to the same sort of gross affront to nature, at least to my Japanese mother, who comes up to my rib cage. She sees my height as a personal insult and something that could have been avoided. It’s all tied up in her mind with her efforts to counteract the Little in my name—she thinks I grew just to mock her. On her saner days, she gazes skyward at my face and blames the red meat she fed me as a child. But it was Minnesota, Ma. There were lots of cows and not a lot of sushi.
When Miss Helen blurted out that remark about chicken necks causing Mr. Purcell’s voice to change and his breasts to grow, I was shocked. I knew about antibiotics from the cute doctor in Oklahoma, and I guess I knew that hormones 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. “Meat is the Message,” or so I’d written, 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.
DES, or diethylstilbestrol, is a man-made estrogen that was first synthesized in 1938. Soon afterward, a professor of poultry husbandry at the University of California discovered that if you inject DES into male chickens, it chemically castrates them. Instant capons. The males develop female characteristics—plump breasts and succulent meats—desirable assets for one’s dinner. After that, subcutaneous DES implants became pretty much de rigueur in the poultry industry, at least until 1959, when the FDA banned them. Apparently, someone 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, which is exactly what happened to Mr. Purcell. The U.S. Department of A
griculture was forced to buy about ten million dollars’ worth of contaminated chicken to get it off the market.
But by then DES was also being widely used in beef production, and oddly enough, the FDA did nothing to stop that. Here is a brief recap:
In 1954, a ruminant nutritionist at Iowa State College had discovered that if you feed DES to beef cattle they get fat quicker. In fact, the DES-“enhanced” cattle could be “finished” (brought to slaughter weight) more than a month sooner than unenhanced animals, on about five hundred pounds less feed. Obviously this was a good thing for meat producers. DES was trumpeted as a “miracle” and “a revolution in the cattle industry,” and without further ado, that very same year, the FDA approved DES for livestock. A year later DES received a patent as the first artificial animal growth stimulant. By the early 1960s, after the ban on implants for chickens, DES was used by more than 95 percent of U.S. cattle feeders to speed up production. Sure, there were accounts of farmers who accidentally breathed or ingested DES powder and started showing symptoms such as impotence, infertility, gynecomastia (enlarged and tender breasts), and changes in their voice register. But in the face of all that promised profit ... And after all, farming has always been a dangerous business. Everyone knows that.
DES changed the face of meat in America. Using DES and other drugs, like antibiotics, farmers could process animals on an assembly line, like cars or computer chips. Open-field grazing for cattle became unnecessary and inefficient and soon gave way to confinement feedlot operations, or factory farms, where thousands upon thousands of penned cattle could be fattened at troughs. This was an economy of scale. It was happening everywhere, the wave of the future, the marriage of science and big business. If I sound bitter, it’s because my grandparents, the Littles, lost the family dairy farm to hormonally enhanced cows, and it broke their hearts and eventually killed them. But I’d never understood this before.
Meanwhile, all this time, since it was first synthesized, DES was being used for another purpose entirely. Researchers and doctors were prescribing it for pregnant women in the belief that DES would prevent miscarriages and premature births. The pharmaceutical companies ran ads in professional medical publications, like the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, recommending the drug for all women to produce “bigger and stronger babies.” Many doctors prescribed it as casually as a vitamin, to an estimated five million women around the world. Five million! This was despite evidence, right from the start, that hormone manipulation during pregnancy was dangerous. In the 1930s, researchers at Northwestern University Medical School gave doses of estrogen to pregnant rats and discovered that the babies were born with various deformities of their sexual organs. But those were rats.
Then, in 1971, a team of Boston doctors discovered that DES caused a rare form of cancer, called clear cell adenocarcinoma, in the vaginas of young women whose mothers had taken the drug during pregnancy. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, DES was finally exposed as a complete sham. That was the real tragedy. It was all hype. As early as 1952, researchers had found that DES did absolutely nothing to prevent miscarriages. On the contrary, a University of Chicago study showed a significant increase not only in miscarriages but also in premature births and infant deaths due to DES. Ironically, it was even used as a morning-after pill to terminate pregnancy. But again, this evidence was ignored.
Once the link between DES and human cancer was established, other effects were discovered as well. In addition to the cancer, DES-EXPOSED daughters were suffering from irregular menstrual cycles, difficult pregnancies, and structural mutations of the vagina, uterus, and cervix. DES sons developed congenital malformations including un-descended and atrophied testicles, abnormally undersize penises, defective sperm production, and low sperm count, all of which increased the risk of testicular cancer and infertility.
Of course, there was an immediate outcry to ban DES in cattle feed. But cheap meat is an inalienable right in the U.S.A., an integral component of the American dream, and the beef producers looked to cheap DES to provide it. So it took almost a decade of bitter political struggle to ban the drug, overcoming tremendous opposition launched by the drug companies and the meat industry, who argued that the doses of DES given to cattle were minuscule and harmless to humans and that the residues in the meat were far below the levels of danger. Finally, in 1979, the government banned DES for use in livestock production.
In 1980, however, half a million cattle from one hundred fifty-six feedlots in eighteen states were found with illegal DES implants. Three hundred eighteen cattlemen had decided that since they didn’t agree with the ban, they would simply ignore it. Frontier justice. You take the law into your own hands. They were given a reprimand. None were prosecuted.
Today, although DES is illegal, 95 percent of feedlot cattle in the U.S. still receive some form of growth-promoting hormone or pharmaceutical in feed supplements. The residues are present in the finished cuts of beef sold in the local supermarket or hanging off your plate.
In 1989, Europe banned the import of U.S. meat because of the use of hormones in production. BEEF-EX started looking for a new market.
In 1990, as a result of pressure by the U.S. government, the New Beef Agreement was signed with Japan, relaxing import quotas and increasing the American share of Japan’s red-meat market.
In 1991, we started production on My American Wife!
This was my first glimpse of the larger picture. Of course, I didn’t put these pieces together all at once. I started reading about the meat industry, and little by little, over the course of the next few months, the chronology sort of dawned on me. Please keep this in mind.
HELEN
Miss Helen stood in front of the church, shaking her head and saying the same thing over and over to her friends and the members of the congregation.
“Yes, today was supposed to be the day, but now she says she ain’t comin’ after all....”
Mr. Purcell added, “And after Miss Helen went and got the fixings all bought and set.”
And the friends and members of the congregation were saying, “It’s too bad, it surely is” and “It’s a pity for the children to get so excited” and “She didn’t give you no reason?”
And Miss Helen just kept shaking her head from side to side, saying, “I guess we just weren’t the right sort” and “What would all them people in Japan be interested in us for, anyway?”
Then Mr. Purcell tried to make things better with laughter by saying, “Well now, Miss Helen, maybe you shoulda just slowed down that pitch of yours a little and let that producer man get a few more hits, now.”
And the Preacher agreed and said, “Sure enough that pitch of yours could scare off anyone!”
And everyone laughed except Miss Helen, who just stood there saying, “It’s a pity, it surely is a pity,” and shaking her head, like she’d expected it to go wrong from the very beginning.
AKIKO
“Authenticity—two! You only gave it a two for Authenticity?” John put down Akiko’s questionnaire for the Becky Thayer Show and stared at her. “What were you thinking? What did you think was wrong with it?”
Akiko shook her head. “There wasn’t anything wrong....”
“Then why did you only give it a two?”
“I ... I don’t know. I gave it an eight for Wholesomeness, though. See? And a nine for Deliciousness of Meats ...”
“Now, what’s the point of Wholesomeness if it’s not Authentic? A two for Authenticity undermines a high mark for Wholesomeness. Why did you only give it a two? You must have had a reason.”
“Because ... I didn’t believe it.”
John slammed his hand down on the kotatsu and Akiko flinched.
“How could you not believe it?” he shouted. “It’s the truth. It’s a documentary program, isn’t it? What is there not to believe?”
“I don’t know,” Akiko whispered. She made a grab for the paper. “You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll change it.”
John snatched it back. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is a questionnaire. You can’t just change your answers because something I say makes you change your mind. These are supposed to be your honest impressions of the show.”
He scowled at the paper again. “Okay. Now what, precisely, did you find hard to believe? Please, try to be specific if you can.”
Akiko hated these sessions. No matter what answers she put down, John always got angry and told her they were wrong. And then she had to defend them.
“I ... I don’t know. It seemed like they were making things up. Like it was artificial, just something they were doing for the program.”
“Who?”
“The Thayer family. They were so ... perfect, you know? I guess maybe they just didn’t feel like a real family to me....”
“Hmmph. What would you know about a real family?”
“No, of course. You’re right. I don’t know much about families at all....”
“You’re missing the whole point.” John sighed, exasperated. “You just don’t get it. The whole point is to show perfect families. We don’t want families with flaws. And anyway, you should have seen the other family....”
Akiko nodded her head. It always seemed to make sense when he explained it to her, so she couldn’t understand why she always got the answers wrong. But still, she supposed it was nice of him to try to teach her about the way television worked and talk to her about his job, so she did her best to listen. Many husbands wouldn’t share their work concerns with their wives at all.
“Of all the stupid ideas, she actually thought this black woman could be an American Wife!”
“Who?”
“Takagi, that American woman director I told you about. The one I had to go all the way to Memphis to help with the program.”
“What was wrong with the black woman?”
John rolled his eyes and snorted. “You should have seen her family. First of all, they were extremely poor. Their accents were so uneducated that even with my level of English I could barely make out what they were saying. And that was just the beginning. The husband had terrible dentistry, gold teeth everywhere, and the wife just looked, well, badly dressed. Their house was not beautiful at all, and the food she cooked! Pig intestines! Entirely inappropriate.”
My Year of Meats Page 12