Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live … Ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence. Like Jane, her horizons are broadened through the programme, although she records her perceptions and we watch her grow not through editing film but in poetry-style lists inspired by an ancient text, Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book.Jane is typically uncompromising in her judgments, but her conclusions by the end of the book are damning, both for herself and the discerning reader “Of course I knew about toxicity in meat .. but I needed a job I chose to ignore what I knew. But as she travels around the States, she embarks on her own traumatic and revelatory emotional journey.Meanwhile Akiko, married to the brutal series promoter, “John Wayne”, cowers at her home in Japan, forced by her husband to cook the recipes she watches on the programme and score each episode out of 10.
Texan housewife Bunny Dunn finds that the hormones fed to cattle at her ranch have a terrifying effect on her daughter. Jane herself is looking for depth rather than surface glitz, and expands the programme’s remit to include lesbian vegetarians and mixed-race families, much to the sponsor’s displeasure. The idea is to present wholesome-looking women cooking nutritious, meaty meals in traditional family homes “I honestly believed I had a mission,” Jane tells us. “I had spent so many years, in both Japan and America, floundering in a miasma of misinformation about culture and race, I was determined to use this window into mainstream network television to educate.
Perhaps it was naive, but I believed, honestly, that I could use wives to sell meat in the service of a Larger Truth.” But as she discovers, that truth is grotesquely at odds with her own convictions.American wife Suzie Flowers, for instance, is devastated when her husband reveals to camera that he’s had an extra-marital affair. Despite hopping across continents and lifestyles, it maintains a cohesive and involving narrative flow. The writing is as ever fluid and pacey, the characterisation deft, and the plots fresh and ingenious. It is hard to imagine Fowler topping his wonderful Spanky, but in he is playing to his strengths, and the book is wholly enjoyable..
