In My Year of Meats, during the interview with Gale Dunn, he said something that struck me as rather odd.
"It's a growth hormone. Perfectly legal. You give the heifers Synovex-H, and the steers get Synovex-S."
"What's in it, do you know?"
He looked at me with scorn. "Estradiol, testosterone, and progesterone. All natural."
It's occurred to me since that this oddness I couldn't put my finger on was threefold; the legal, the natural, and [the absence of] the moral.
Though every person in every culture has a different conception of the moral implications of their actions, there are some common cultural institutions that are designed to guide our actions. As he tells Jane about the growth hormone, he tries to reassure the viewers and Jane that these hormones are legal and natural, but in fact he is really attempting to reassure himself that what he is doing is culturally accepted and that he is representing BEEF-EX to the best of his ability. At first I though that the look of scorn was in reference to the "do you know?" but it seems that the real question being asked was "does it matter [to you]?"
The day the bovine is born, it takes on the identity of food, it becomes a pseudo-living thing. By asking does he know what's in the growth hormones, Jane is questioning the standard of living as well as the role the animal is forced to perform. In Gale's mind, however, these moral questions have already been answered by cultural institutions, namely the law system as well as American culture (which deems that "natural" is inherently good). At face value, Jane appears to ask a relatively harmless question simply to extract information, but his look of scorn and the reader's knowledge of Jane's true motive assure us that it's a loaded question.
The interaction between Jane and Gale reminded me of the violent altercation between John and Akiko. It seemed to parallel Gale's relationship with the bovines, albeit in a more overtly violent way. In John and Akiko's case, the rape is an assertion of Akiko's intended role as a child-bearing woman. Though there extreme overtones of dominance (which are also reflected in Gale's case), the majority of the dialogue was regarding her duplicity, which (in John's eyes) was an attempt to undermine the institution of marriage and the foundations of a patriarchal society (which admittedly draw from the overtones of dominance).
Just as in Dale's culturally accepted relationship with the bovines , John is forcing Akiko's role upon her in a way he feels is culturally accepted. Both Jane and Akiko question cultural institutions that are intended to bring about order and the transgression is met with hostility (to say the least). To justify their dominance, and later hostility, both John and Gale dehumanize their subjects. Gale dehumanizes the bovines by viewing them as unprepared meat while John views his wife as a fraudulent, willingly unfertile mate. In each case the exposure of an outside influence has questioned the institutions that justify the farce (dehumanization).