Tainted Meat

There are three ideas with in the novel My Year of Meats that are colliding or should I say, they are intertwine with each other like a spiders web of conspiracy. The three ideas are profit/money, class and hormones and these three ideas lead to a big picture. A large beef company syndicate called BEEF-EX is expanding their meat empire to Japan. In order to entice the Japanese population to purchase BEEF-EX meats, they produce a show called My American Wife to display the wholesomeness of America through meat especially through beef. They show beef as a high class meat used by wholesome middle class American, basically their view of the perfect candidate to represent the beef. But the illustration of this wholesome meat is a happy cover up. What’s really inside the meats are man made hormones like DES, recycled feeds (which I find repulsive) cement, plastics, hell why not put a kitchen sink in there! The author of this book basically writes that these tainted meats are giving Americans cancers, infertility, and making antibiotics useless to use, and all this just to make a profit.
This is what is going to happen if the claims in this book are true and it persists. BEEF-EX expands, they sell their meats world wide. Their meat festering in hormones and other deviances will decline the birth rate. I already see a correlation, all western countries (Europe, America) have had a decline in birth rates and all of these countries eat a large amount of meat. Countries like China, India non-western states that don’t eat a lot of meat has a rise in birth rates. The use of hormones in meats may result in a decline in birth rates and may link to certain cancers, but our culture is surrounded by meat. Fast food restaurants, commercials all of these things depict meat is American as apple pie. I tried not eating meat after reading My Year of Meats and I failed because the sizzling sound of a 12oz steak with mashed potatoes and fries at Marie Calendars made my mouth water and the books words and facts seem to turn away like dust in the wind. Propaganda like My American Wife is imbedded in our psyche that it would be hard for us Americans to give up our meat.