My Year of Meats Quotes

“Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“There are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong.”
― Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Coming at us like this--in waves, massed and unbreachable--knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment--becomes bad knowledge--so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness... "Ignorance." In this root sense, 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... If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance... Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“You never know who it's going to be, or what they'll bring, but whatever it is, it's always exactly what is needed.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Ignorance.” In this root sense, 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.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Information about toxicity in food is widely available, but people don’t want to hear it. Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control.
Coming at us like this — in waves, massed and unbreachable—knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment—becomes bad knowledge—so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness. . . . In this root sense, 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.
I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterises the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“In this root sense, 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.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“This is trouble with you. You think you want, you don't think you want–always back and forth. Me, when I want, it is with whole heart. I look at wanted thing with eyes straight on. But you! Neither here nor there. Your looking always crooked, from side of eye. It has no power to hold. So wanted thing, it slip away from you.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Maybe she was in a coma after all and just didn’t know it.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“I would like to think of my 'ignorance' less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Main Street is dead, which is no news to the families whose families ran family businesses on Main Street. When I returned...I found that all the local businesses from my childhood had been extirpated by Wal-Mart. If there is one single symbol for the demise of regional American culture, it is this superstore prototype, a huge capitalist boot that stomped the moms and pops, like soft, damp worms, to death. Don’t get me wrong. I love Wal-Mart. There is nothing I like more than to consign a mindless afternoon to those aisles, suspending thought, judgment. It’s like television. But to a documentarian of American culture, Wal-Mart is a nightmare. When it comes to towns, Hope, Alabama, becomes the same as Hope, Wyoming, or, for that matter, Hope, Alaska, and in the end, all that remains of our pioneering aspirations are the confused and self-conscious simulacra of relic culture: Ye Olde Curiosities ‘n’ Copie Shoppe, Deadeye Dick’s Saloon and Karaoke Bar—ingenious hybrids and strange global grafts that are the local businessperson’s only chance of survival in economies of scale.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Stocking up" is what our robust Americans called it, laughing nervously, because profligate abundance automatically evokes its opposite, the unspoken specter of dearth.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“but it was an example of how not saying something made it hang around in the air, like a refrain that just keeps coming back at you, again and again.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Like all the parts of the Gulf War we didn’t see on TV, parts that were never reported.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“For the second time since she left Japan, she shivered with excitement. She’d felt it at the dinner table at Thanksgiving, and now, again, even stronger—as if somehow she’d been absorbed into a massive body that had taken over the functions of her own, and now it was infusing her small heart with the superabundance of its feeling, teaching her taut belly to swell, stretching her rib cage, and pumping spurts of happy life into her fetus.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Information about toxicity in food is widely available, but people don’t want to hear it.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Ghosts require ceremony.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Nothing is simple. There are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“The United States has lost one-third of its topsoil since colonial times—so much damage in such a short history. Six to seven billion tons of eroded soil, about 85 percent, are directly attributable to livestock grazing and unsustainable methods of farming feed crops for cattle. In 1988, more than 1.5 million acres in Colorado alone were damaged by wind erosion during the worst drought and heat wave since the 1950s.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“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 Agriculture 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:”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has become the culture, what’s left of local color. We are a grisly nation.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Guns, race, meat, and Manifest Destiny all collided in a single explosion of violent, dehumanized activity.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“You know, it scares me. I mean, allergies are one thing. But all these surplus antibiotics are raising people’s tolerances, and it won’t be long before the stuff just doesn’t work anymore. There’s all sorts of virulent bacteria that are already resistant.... It’s like back to the future—we’re headed backward in time, toward a pre-antibiotic age.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“If there is one single symbol for the demise of regional American culture, it is this superstore prototype, a huge capitalist3 boot that stomped the moms and pops, like soft, damp worms, to death.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“When I'd put enough distance between us, it occurred to me that I was probably the only person in the history of the world who has ever recalled Shōnagon in a strip joint in Texas. I liked that”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Being half, I am evidence that race, too, will become relic. Eventually we're all going to be brown, sort of. Some days, when I'm reeling grand, I feel brand-new - like a prototype. Back in the olden days, my dad's ancestors got stuck behind the Alps and my mom's on the east side of the Urals. Now, oddly, I straddle this blessed, ever-shrinking world.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes pro-active, a political statement. Our collective norm.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“root sense, 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.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats