Ruth Ozeki – My Year Of Meats

Tags

Big Pharma, Book Review, Food Industry, My Year Of Meats, Politics Of Food, Ruth Ozeki, Soapbox and Issue Novel

Hippocrates Spinning in his grave: Let Food Be Your Poison, and Poison Your Food

I had never heard of the Japanese/American/Canadian novelist Ruth Ozeki before delightedly coming across her Booker shortlisted novel A Tale for The Time Being. I am now working through her hardly even handful of earlier titles

Like Time Being, My Year Of Meat, also published at one time as My Year Of Meats,  is told in two voices, a hybrid American Japanese one, living in America, and a Japanese one, in Japan.

The Japanese voice is that of Akiko, a woman suffering hugely in a culture which is part way its own history, but also being bent and bending itself, into American obsession. The second voice is Jane, a version of Ozeki herself, a Westernised independent woman of Japanese American birth, born in the USA, who nevertheless is ‘hybrid’ and therefore, whilst seeing herself as American, is viewed partly as outsider from both cultures, and indeed views both cultures from the outside.

Jane Tagaki-Little  is a documentary film maker. The Beef Industry, keen to spread its markets more globally, is producing a series of real-life documentaries which are designed to sell more meat, and persuade Japanese people to ‘cook more American’ exchanging a largely fish diet for one containing huge slabs of cow. The production company has to sell the product by selling the (artificial, air-brushed) corn-fed blonde view of the American family. The highlight of each programme in My American Wife involves cooking the slab of cow in some way,  for example  – in a tin of mushroom soup, rolled in dried powdered onion soup after marinating in Coca-Cola (not Pepsi-Cola)

The programmes are car-crash rubberneckingly awful, and hysterically funny – Oprah confessional style, all at once. So is poor Akiko, disturbingly frail and flawed, married to an awful husband (an executive for the company, Beef-Ex, trying to push and expand its markets) Akiko’s vision both acts as a commentary on her own society, and, as she is forced to give her opinion of the programmes, of the unreal-American-dream culture – ‘not authentic, not likeable’

Meanwhile Jane, who is warm about America, is warm about a very different sort of America, recognising the multicultural nature of the country, which, from the start, was patchwork and ethnically rich. The families she wants to celebrate are not the airbrushed ones, but those of eccentricity, individuality, complex ethnicity and authenticity.

And then she begins to run into the politics of the food industry.

The fact that my favourite writer on the politics, and machinations of that unholy combination of the food, agribusiness and pharmaceuticals industry, Michael Pollan, ‘wowed’ Ozeki’s book will give an idea of its flavour. Ozeki, like Barbara Kingsolver, is a writer with environmental concerns, and there is a strong element of exposure of cynical derring-do, with profit being put before people, with the evidence of a corrupt industry or industries tampering with food, using banned drugs, long after they have been banned in one place, in another. As an example DES (diethylstilboestrol), banned in the chicken industry, neatly sideswept for another couple of decades into the beef industry, neatly sideswept improperly tested, as a maintainer of pregnancy world-wide to help women avoid miscarriage, until the inevitable side effects began to surface. Then re-marketed as a morning after pill to inhibit implantation of a fertilised ovum.

The politicisation of Jane in this area, and therefore her role as an educator on the science of all this, is not in any way difficult or gratuitous. Ozeki’s magnificent ability to give hard facts light touch sees the reader through without feeling overwhelmed. First and foremost Ozeki is after all a novelist. It is just she is a novelist ABOUT, a social, journalistic novelist if you like. And the social, political rationale for the novel has a fine pedigree – which we can trace from Victorian writers like Dickens and Trollope, exposing the seamy side of their society, to Upton Sinclair and well beyond. Upton Sinclair was a radical so called issue ‘muckraking journalist’ novelist, and Pulitzer prizewinner. His book about the lives of immigrant in the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, published in 1906 was exposing even THEN the seamy corruption of the food industry and capitalism as bedfellows.

Where Ozeki differs from these authors, is her gender, and her hybrid, therefore outsider viewpoint from any culture. If you are not interested in a book about the food and pharmaceuticals industry – read this as a fascinating, painful and funny book about feeling like an outsider, about changing cultures, cultures in collision, delivered playfully and with subtlety. Just be prepared, every now and again, for a hammer blow to set you reeling.

Ozeki IS a polemic writer, but she is not only a polemicist.

Brilliant. I will definitely now be buying Ozeki the second!

My Year Of Meats Amazon UK
My Year Of Meats Amazon UK

Meanwhile, for those who would like to find out more about DES the blog DES Daughter Network may be of sobering interest

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Sounds disgusting, sounds repellent – but……….

Tags

Big Pharma, health, Holism, Medicine, Philosophy, Reflection, Soapbox, Tangible Intangibility

Where the darkest shadow falls, the brightest light is shining

There is a blog I follow, Medical Revolt written by an American clinician, trained in conventional medicine, but married to a complementary health practitioner. I follow his blog with great interest as I too have a deep interest in complementary and holistic approaches to health.

Indeed, the word Hael, an old English word, has a word root from which other words, other concepts are derived – Hael, Whole, Health, Holy, Holistic, Holism (literally, what is holy, is also wholly, the whole is more Hale/Hael healthy than the sum of its parts. Hail! (as in a word used to greet) – is to wish good health – and therefore good all-the-sum-of-your-parts – body, mind, spirit – to the other.

Perhaps we could even say it is even more than to wish that to other – it is also to GREET (or recognise) that which is hale/whole/healthy/holy in each other. And where do we see or recognise the health/holy/completeness of the other – except from that part of ourselves which is similarly healthy/holy/complete, no matter how broken parts of us may be, or may appear to be, to ourselves or each other.

So………….what does this have to do with Medical Revolt’s blog, or the title or subtitle of this post……and why am I particularly interested in, and excited by, Mr Revolt’s blog, rather than any other blog about matters to do with health and wellbeing, whether physiological, psychological, spiritual or the whole-hael-of-what-is.

Well, it’s the SCIENCE. It’s incredibly common, for what I suppose I might loosely think of as the broad world of matter – physics – and the broad world of the intangible – metaphysics, to be distrustful or dismissive of each other. In fact there is a place where everything becomes (and indeed contains), its opposite

So I am rather more interested in finding out about cutting edge biological science from the edge where oppositions meet. It’s the Buddhist concept of ‘The Middle Way’. The ‘extremes of thinking’ for me – whether of number crunching pure statistics, or the edge of irrational (in my view) extremes of New Age-ism both frustrate me equally, because they fail to contain opposition, and the duality of homoeostasis AND entropy, – whatever movements there are towards the edge – expansion, dissolution, flying apart, this OR that, the opposite exists, the condensation, the contraction, the holding together. This AND That, rather than This OR That

Mr Revolt, for me, provides a beautiful illustration, approaching the far-out through a scientific rationale, or approaching the scientific precision of taking a thing apart to see its inner workings through the paradigm of encompassing the whole.

Not micro OR macro but micro AND macro (and of course the oppositional middle which contains the whole

Oh but hang on, what is it with the post title – there has been little of disgust and repellent so far, (you might be thinking, if you have had the patience to stay thus far) and what’s this about dark shadow and bright light, even:

commons on flicr –  silentius’ photostream,

There is an obvious physical manifestation that it is when the sun is brightest (more illuminative) that the shadows, the areas without light, where objects interrupt the light, are seen. Sunlight and shade are neither good nor bad, they are.  The above yin and yang version does the illustration through sunlight and shadow, night day, dark light

There is a concept, from Jungian psychotherapy, of the ‘shadow self’  – the self we do not wish others to see. It is the self we may not even wish to see ourselves. We don’t want to own that shameful self, that hidden self. This is the self (because WE place constructs on it of illumination good, hidden/shadow= shady, dodgy,bad) The shadow (whether individual, cultural, or of an epoch) – is however made visible through illumination, and the shadow contains within it the light and the illumination.

yes, yes, but what is it which is so disgusting????

Well Mr Medical Revolt (you will be REALLY pleased I’m not posting the obvious illustration at this point) made an absolutely FASCINATING (well it was, as far as I’m concerned) post about a rather counter-intuitive way of dealing with a potentially lethal gut bacterium, which is on the verge of being untreatable by any antibiotics – indeed has developed strength, virulence and population growth THROUGH the over-prescription of antibiotics. Here’s a pic of C.difficile – it is found in the intestine.

Medical Revolt’s post on ‘Poo Cure for Clostridium difficile’

Now, seeing the title of Mr Revolt’s post, aren’t you pleased I am going no further with graphics at this point?

What fascinated and interested me about his post, once I got beyond the Yeurrh gut (!) reaction stage, the disgust, the horrified embarrassed black humour, and even the science of it and the predictable anger at Big Pharma trying to suppress it, was this:

It was such an illustration of the shadow side, that which is unwanted, hidden, which we wish to eliminate (hah!) from ourselves, vent from ourselves, void from ourselves, being the part from where new health may come.

Strange to find excrement itself (well, it was strange to me) providing some sort of visceral (ha again) illumination about the metaphysics of dark and light, and the absorbed, acknowledged and integrated shadow rather than the disowned shadow

This post of mine, has, finally a practical purpose. As someone who doesn’t facebook, doesn’t tweet: I believe Medical Revolt’s post is hugely and scientifically important. Changes in medical thinking may often come ground up, rather than top down. Many extremely compassionate, caring dedicated clinicians ARE UNAWARE of unconventional effective, safer treatment protocols other than the protocols of Big Pharma itself or the last resort surgical scalpel – for all the obvious reason. PHARMA isn’t going to publicise the positive evidence of anything unpatentable.

Patients and clients are often the means by which other approaches come to the awareness of clinicians. Information just needs to be out there more widely in collective consciousness. If I did twit, face, or anything else, I would be twitfacing Mr Revolt’s post.

A journey of a thousand (virtual) miles  starts with a single facetwit!

Ancient Chinese Digital proverb, often unattributed to Lao Tzu

Flicr, Commons, elliotmoore photostream

James Davies – Cracked: Why Psychiatry Is Doing More Harm Than Good

Tags

Big Pharma, Book Review, Cracked: Why Psychiatry Is Doing More Harm Than Good, James Davies, Medicine, Psychiatry, Soapbox

Wool Pulled Justifiable Rage Disorder

Why has the prescription of antidepressant medicine roughly tripled in less than 20 years? Is it that we are indeed becoming sicker, that we are all becoming more and more stressed and psychologically unwell, is it merely that doctors and psychiatrists are much more skilled at diagnosing psychiatric conditions than they used to be, or is it that we are now medicalising (drugging) what is normal about the variety of day to day human experiences, which at times can be sorrowful, challenging or confusing?

This briiliantly clear, cogently argued, shocking and timely book by psychotherapist and anthropologist James Davies rendered me almost incoherent with rage, exposing as it did something which many of us have been aware of, but maybe have not had the tools or ability to follow to a conclusion. James Davies has those tools and abilities; he thoughtfully, knowledgeably, skilfully connects all the dots together, uncovering the horrendous duplicity, collusion and sheer unscientific snake oil peddling visited upon us by Big Pharma, in the field of mental health.

I can’t urge the reading of this book strongly enough. Anyone who cares about what it means to be a fully human being, and especially anyone involved in any way in the caring professions needs to be aware of what Davies lays clear about the mental health industry. For industry it surely is.

With a carefully constructed series of explanations, revelations and arguments Davies delivers telling knock out punches to the House of Trick Cards of current mainstream psychiatry. The major punches involve

1)    The increasing categorisation of VIRTUALLY ANY EMOTIONAL STATE so that it falls within a category of disorder – thus opening the way to the development of chemical coshes. This categorisation – the ‘Bible’ used to denote syndromes, the DSM (currently DSM 5), is NOT the result of huge studies and research itself, yet it gets used as if it were the result of close scientific analyses. The result of the sort of sordid, limiting tickboxy thinking, turning us all into robots who can be managed out of our normal human pain is the crass thinking that says, for example, if after a bereavement, sleep appetite and general mood are affected for more than 2 weeks, anti-depressants may be helpfully prescribed. Crazy, insidious, crass. We have become so afraid of our suffering that the answer becomes ‘cosh it, flat line what it is to be in any way human’

1926 city scene, Fritz Lang Metroplis. Flicr Commons

2)    Trials – various meta analysis studies have shown that antidepressants are BARELY more effective, in mild to moderate depression, to placebo. Drug companies have disquietingly low bars to climb over, in order to ‘prove’ their products effectiveness. Davies uncovers the secrecy, the UNPUBLISHED drug trials that go against the findings Big Pharma wants and the manipulation of results. More than this, how drug companies positively USE that most powerful of tools – PLACEBO ITSELF to manipulate their own results higher – for example, the colour, the name, the advertising of the pharmaceutical – many of the effects that might be assumed to be the result of the chemistry of the drug ‘better than placebo’ – are in fact DUE to the use of placebo!

3)    There has been a change in thinking from the 60s and 70s, where psychiatric drugs were seen as altering mood (in the same way as any mind altering drug, including alcohol and street drugs alter moods) A shift occurred to thinking of psychiatric drugs as ‘curative’. This might not seem an important shift – however it goes along with the idea that much uncomfortable, difficult human emotion is now being seen as potentially aberrant and classifiable as a ‘disease’ – as in the DSM – shyness becomes ‘social phobia’.

Medical naming encourages thinking about human beings in all their complexity as broken, and needing mending – and opens the door to the over-prescription. In fact, as one astute expert (among the many) Davies consults, points out tersely, this thinking of these drugs as ‘cures’ is erroneous, as unlike most physiological disease there just is no hard evidence to support the biology of a lot of what is now being treated as ‘disease’ through these medications – which alter mood. They do not ‘cure’ shyness, (or, lets medicalise it as social phobia) any more than a glass of wine ‘cures’ shyness – both change ways of perceiving the world, that is all.

4)    Who bites the hand that feeds? There is a huge cover-up, smoke and mirrors going on in the world of funding ‘research’ into psychiatric medicine whether in academic institutions, or with clinicians. And, gentle reader, there is even less transparency over this in the UK than there is in the States, where under the Obama administration, spearheaded by a particularly truth-and-justice campaigning Senator, Senator Grassley, some efforts to bring the Pharma hyena under the spotlight are beginning to bear fruit. But not here, where there is murk a plenty. Perhaps though, the fact that fully 56% of the panel member luminaries involved in writing the DSM-IV  bible had 1 or more financial associations with the pharmaceutical industry, should begin to rip the wool from over our eyes.  And, for those writing/creating the diagnostic categories, which would of course be primarily treated by pharmaceuticals,  – 88% of DSM-IV panel members had drug company financial ties.from Big Pharma. And things don’t have appeared to have changed for the better in terms of ‘arms length’ involvement with the writing of the now current DSM-V.

I am not saying (nor is Davies) that all these senior clinicians and medical academicians are corrupt, merely that neutrality becomes hard to achieve when your income is dependent on a particular company who are hoping your findings will support the excellence of their product, and even to demonstrate a need for their product

I received this book as an ARC – of course, given what I have said in point 4, you may feel that my judgement is compromised. I would argue that a lowly amateur reviewer lucky enough to get offered bookie freebies through third parties does not in any way equate to some stars of the psychiatric industry who receive millions for the sterling work they do in supporting the claims of specific drugs and manufacturers.  A look at some of my reviews on Amazon will show that if I think a particular book is poor I will indeed say so.

This one though gets my gold standard bookie trial award. Properly researched, properly cited, free from duplicitous cover-up. Unlike the industry is exposes.It deserves to be a best seller – indeed, needs to be so – its material is provocative, prescient, and vital to know.

I have one cavil – my ARC was a digital copy, from the publisher via NetGalley. Now I don’t know if this will be any different than the standard digitise prepared for sale, but the digitisation on my ARC was poor – a lot of the useful charts and graphs do not appear and footnotes get chopped and inexplicably appear in the middle of other pages.  If I were buying this book, I would definitely choose hard, over digitised, copy.

Available now in the UK, paper and digital; not in the USA in paper until August but available as digital
Cracked: Why Psychiatry Is Doing More Harm Than Good UK
Cracked: Why Psychiatry Is Doing More Harm Than Good USA