Edible Ideologies: Food Politics and Gender Formation in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats

English

When food is conventionally considered as a primary source of consumption at the surface level, it also carries multiple layers of meaning underneath with reference to culture, identity, ethnicity, gender and class. Food plays a very important role in defining the structures within society and is also deeply immersed in the political frameworks that are operating at local, national and global level. From the period of colonial expansion to contemporary neoliberal order, food has played a decisive role in shaping historical events, economic hierarchies, and power relations. Yet, despite its centrality, the gendered dimensions of food practices—particularly those governing women’s consumption and labor—have remained marginal within mainstream gastronomic discourse. Drawing on feminist and cultural materialist perspectives, Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats exposes the political economy of the global meat industry and the ways in which dominant national powers exert control over developing nations through food systems, with women positioned as primary sites of regulation and exploitation. By juxtaposing American and Japanese food cultures, the novel critically unveils the ideological operations of the American meat industry, its modes of production, and its transnational circulation. Gender construction in the narrative is articulated through prescriptive norms and coercive instructions imposed on women’s bodies and diets, revealing how seemingly normalized food practices function as mechanisms of patriarchal control. Food thus becomes a tool for the objectification of women, legitimized through intersecting categories such as culture, ethnicity, class, and nation. While women traditionally occupy the private domain of food through acts of cooking, feeding, and nurturing, Ozeki underscores a significant shift in power when food enters the public and commercial sphere, where authority is predominantly male dominated. This displacement reveals the structural nature of gender inequality embedded within global food economies. Consequently, this article examines how food politics within the global meat industry intersect with gender politics, ultimately constraining women’s agency and reinforcing unequal social relations.

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