My Year of Meats Read Online Free PDF

“Pretty Home,” “Romantic Moody,” and the “Sociological Survey,” which purported to investigate “Timely Topic in American Home and Nation.” Okay, it was really dumb.
    I was upset. I may have been glib in my pitch and clumsy in my initial dealings with the wives, but I honestly believed I had a mission. Not just for some girl in the next millennium, but for here and now. 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.
    I mean, this was an amazing opportunity for a documentarian. My American Wife! was broadcast on a major national network on Saturday mornings, targeting Japanese housewives with school-age children, who represented the largest meat-eating slice of the population. The show played opposite cartoons, which wasn’t easy. But the first episodes we’d shot had scored ratings of up to 7.8 percent and penetrated approximately 9,563,310 households. This was very good. With an average of 3.0 persons per household, an estimated 28,689,930 members of the Japanese population watched our show, and the sponsors were pleased. I mean, that’s a lot of sirloin.
    Part of the success was due to the marketing angle that the Network chose. My American Wife!, they assured the Japanese audiences, was produced “virtually entirely” by a real American crew, so the America conveyed was authentic , not one distorted by the preconceptions of jaded Japanese TV producers.
    But of course it wasn’t real at all. Already, by February, I sat through each program out of a sense of responsibility and residual loyalty to an ideal. Kenji watched them all too. He didn’t get out of the office much, or out of New York, and maybe that’s why he liked the shows. As we stared at Suzie’s frozen face, I wondered: Were we even seeing the same thing?
    “Fred, the husband, left her right after the Survey....”
    Kenji popped another nut into his mouth. “Was it your fault?” He had taken off his Italian loafers and was trying to operate the edit deck controls with his toe. His socks were made of fine knit silk. “Will we get sued?”
    “No. I don’t know. I doubt it. He was having an affair with some cocktail waitress, but he got so bent out of shape at us being there, and mad at Suzie for inviting us, that after he flipped his card, he told her. Everything. Right there, in front of us, in front of her family, the whole neighborhood. You see that expression on her face? That’s her reaction shot. The director didn’t speak a word of English and didn’t understand what the guy was saying—he just had Suzuki keep on filming.”
    “Who was the director?”
    “That bonehead Oda. Afterward, when we were watching dailies at the hotel and I explained what had happened, Oda got all excited and suggested using Fred’s confession, then cutting to a sex scene with the cocktail waitress.”
    “He was serious?”
    “Totally. He didn’t get the concept of ‘wholesome.’ I had to call Tokyo and get Kato to explain the mandate of BEEF-EX to him.”
    Kenji shrugged, sat up, and rewound the tape. Suzie’s face recomposed briefly, then Kenji hit the Play button again. The Japanese announcer’s voice-over asked, “Have you ever had an extramarital affair?” The participants held up their Survey cards, and-the camera zoomed in on Fred’s big YES. The sound-effect track swelled with canned laughter, and Suzie’s face collapsed into its expression of horror, punctuated with a resounding boinnggg!
    “That’s awful,” Kenji said, grinning. “But it works....”
    “It makes me sick. How can we send this tape to her? The whole thing is a lie. Here, watch the ending.”
    Suzie and Fred were curled on the pink shag rug in front of the fire, toasting each other with