My Year of Meats (15 page)

We sat in the small living room. The faded pastel-green walls were decorated with department store portraits of all nine children. A collection of gilt trophies for softball, baseball, and basketball, and singing awards for the Harmony Five, covered the side table, spilled over onto the bookshelf, and reached all the way to the top of the television. A dusty bouquet of blue plastic roses sat there too. When the children ran in and out of the kitchen, thudding down the corridor into their rooms, the walls shuddered and set the roses quivering. But the running children seemed very far away all of a sudden. As the world outside receded and the living room closed in around us, I realized that we had entered one of those funny warps in which the social paradigm shifts out from under you. After all the commotion and the naked outpouring of emotion at church, we were suddenly all alone together. And silent. Stricken with self-consciousness.

Miss Helen sat on an upright wooden chair from the kitchen with her hands folded in the lap of her polka dot Sunday dress, still wearing her hat. She was a large woman, but lean and strong, and you could see the muscles running down her calves, underneath the thick nylon stockings. She knew how to hold perfectly still, head bowed, barely there. Next to her, Mr. Purcell sat on the couch, wearing a shiny green suit with big wide lapels. The springs of the couch had collapsed and the seat cushions sank so low that his knees stuck up, and this in turn hiked up the cuffs of his pants to expose his skinny callused ankles. His shoes were worn but meticulously polished. He was nervous and smiled at us broadly, flashing a mouthful of huge, crooked gold-capped teeth.

Ueno and I were seated side by side on the two chairs that were obviously meant for guests. It was up to me.

“Miss Helen, I wanted to ask you a bit about your family’s diet—the kind of things you like to eat?”

Miss Helen sat very still and stared at her lap. Mr. Purcell just smiled and smiled.

“I was wondering if you could tell John here a little bit about your chitterlings?”

“Yes, ma’am,” whispered Miss Helen.

The “ma’am” caught me by surprise and threw me off. It was so formal. We waited for her to continue.

“You know, the chitterlings that you’re famous for?” I prompted.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Again, she was silent.

“What do you eat with the chitterlings?” I didn’t know what to do. The “ma’am” had turned me into a teacher or a social worker giving her a test, its questions so inane as to be incomprehensible. It was safer for her just to say nothing. “Do you eat something with the chitterlings?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What do you ... Do you eat vegetables of some kind?”

“Yes.”

“Like ... collard greens?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And anything else? Like ... corn bread?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It was a guessing game, but my preconceived notions of Southern cooking were limited by what was available on the menus of country-style, home-cooking restaurants in SoHo, and I was running out of suggestions.

“Uh, anything else? Do you eat anything else?”

“Hog maws,” offered Mr. Purcell.

Ueno snorted. He was sitting back in his chair, arms crossed, retracted back into his impassive Japanese businessman persona. He was making me very nervous.

“How about other meats?” he asked. “You like another kind meats too?”

“Chicken,” Mr. Purcell said. “We sure do like chicken, but even chicken ain’t cheap now. Used to be they had these
parts
that was real good. And cheap down at the packin’ house ...”

Miss Helen let out a hiccup that turned into a burst of laughter.

“Yeah, we
thought
they was real good ... until Mr. Purcell’s barrytone came out soundin’ serpraner!”

Ueno looked at me questioningly, but I didn’t get it, either.

Purcell explained. “It was some medicines they was usin’ in the chickens that got into the necks that we was eatin’.... An’ that medicine, well, if it didn’t start to make me sound just like a woman!”

“And look just like one too, with them teeny little titties and everything!” Miss Helen chimed in.

I still didn’t get it, but Ueno cut them off with another snort. He leaned forward.

“What about beef? You like beef?”

Miss Helen looked up in surprise. “Oh, no, sir.”

“No? But why you don’t like it? Steak is most delicious.”

Purcell shrugged. “You got kids?” he asked. Ueno stiffened slightly and shook his head. “Red meat’s too costly with so many mouths to feed,” explained Purcell apologetically.

“We get hamburger sometimes,” offered Miss Helen.

“That’s right, we do. Miss Helen’ll fry up some for the kids ever so often. But to my mind red meat ain’t half so tasty as white....” Mr. Purcell’s voice trailed off into silence.

Ueno sat back and I wrapped up the interview as quickly as I could. I waited for Ueno to say something, but he kept quiet. We had dinner with the family while the neighbors gathered, and then the softball game got under way. Ueno didn’t eat much, or say much. After the meal, he played a few innings and even scored a hit off of Miss Helen, although I suspected she let him. But the whole time, I was worried. I didn’t trust him one bit.

“We’ll be back,” I said loudly, for Ueno’s benefit, as we got ready to leave. “We’ll see you again, soon.” Miss Helen walked us to the car and hugged first Ueno, then me.

“I gotta confess I was nervous at first,” she said softly, holding on to my hands. “We never met no Japanese people before and we didn’t know what kind of folks you’d turn out to be. But we’re all real glad you came. We’re lookin’ forward to when you come back with the camera.”

Mr. Purcell shook Ueno’s hand, pumping it up and down like he was priming a well.

We got in the car and backed down the driveway. As we drove away from Harmony, Ueno pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his hands. The tension in the car started to build. Ueno dropped the ax at the Tennessee border.

“I have decided you must make program about the Thayer family.”

Of course. I had been expecting this.

“Why?!” I exploded. “That is absolutely insane. The Dawes are wonderful. They’re perfect. It took them a while to warm up, but you’ll never get a more interesting show than that. The Thayers have
nothing,
there’s no comparison. Think about the church! How can you even
consider
not filming there, after what you went through today?”

“It’s not about me. It’s a question of meats.”

“What about the meats?”

“Mrs. Becky Thayers has better meats. She has beautiful beef.”

“But I thought ‘Pork is Possible!’ ”

“Yes, but ‘Beef is Best!’ And as you know, chitterling is not pork, Takagi. It is the intestine of pig.
My American Wife!
is for Japanese people, not for Koreans or black peoples.”

“You racist bastard.”

He turned and stared at me, narrowing his eyes. “I didn’t make up rules. This is U.S.-sponsor show and U.S.-sponsor instruction.” He looked away again, at the brilliant green curtains of kudzu draping the trees and spilling down the berm by the side of the road. He folded his arms across his chest.

“Meat is the message, Takagi,” he said, surveying the landscape with a grim air of accomplishment. “If you cannot learn this, you cannot be director for my program. That is all I will say.”

Anyone who travels around the sprawling heartland of this country must at some point wonder why Americans are so uniformly obese. Are we
all
so ignorant about diet and health? Or so greedy, or so terrified of famine that we continuously, and almost unconsciously, stockpile body fat? Or is there something else? These are the questions that Suzuki and Oh would ask me, confronted with yet another bleeding steak the size of a manhole cover, spilling over the sides of the plate. And the potato, stuffed with butter and sour cream? Why both? they would cry in dismay.

I am not fat, but my tallness amounts to the same sort of gross affront to nature, at least to my Japanese mother, who comes up to my rib cage. She sees my height as a personal insult and something that could have been avoided. It’s all tied up in her mind with her efforts to counteract the Little in my name—she thinks I grew just to mock her. On her saner days, she gazes skyward at my face and blames the red meat she fed me as a child. But it was Minnesota, Ma. There were lots of cows and not a lot of sushi.

When Miss Helen blurted out that remark about chicken necks causing Mr. Purcell’s voice to change and his breasts to grow, I was shocked. I knew about antibiotics from the cute doctor in Oklahoma, and I guess I knew that hormones were used too. I’d just never given it much thought before. But now I couldn’t get the image of Mr. Purcell out of my head. “Meat is the Message,” or so I’d written, and suddenly I wanted to know more. Once I started researching, it didn’t take me long to stumble across DES. It was a discovery that ultimately changed my relationship with meats and television. It also changed the course of my life. Bear with me; this is an important Documentary Interlude.

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:

In 1954, a ruminant nutritionist at Iowa State College had discovered that if you feed DES to beef cattle they get fat quicker. In fact, the DES-“enhanced” cattle could be “finished” (brought to slaughter weight) more than a month sooner than unenhanced animals, on about five hundred pounds less feed. Obviously this was a good thing for meat producers. DES was trumpeted as a “miracle” and “a revolution in the cattle industry,” and without further ado, that very same year, the FDA approved DES for livestock. A year later DES received a patent as the first artificial animal growth stimulant. By the early 1960s,
after
the ban on implants for chickens, DES was used by more than 95 percent of U.S. cattle feeders to speed up production. Sure, there were accounts of farmers who accidentally breathed or ingested DES powder and started showing symptoms such as impotence, infertility, gynecomastia (enlarged and tender breasts), and changes in their voice register. But in the face of all that promised profit ... And after all, farming has always been a dangerous business. Everyone knows that.

DES changed the face of meat in America. Using DES and other drugs, like antibiotics, farmers could process animals on an assembly line, like cars or computer chips. Open-field grazing for cattle became unnecessary and inefficient and soon gave way to confinement feedlot operations, or factory farms, where thousands upon thousands of penned cattle could be fattened at troughs. This was an economy of scale. It was happening everywhere, the wave of the future, the marriage of science and big business. If I sound bitter, it’s because my grandparents, the Littles, lost the family dairy farm to hormonally enhanced cows, and it broke their hearts and eventually killed them. But I’d never understood this before.

Meanwhile, all this time, since it was first synthesized, DES was being used for another purpose entirely. Researchers and doctors were prescribing it for pregnant women in the belief that DES would prevent miscarriages and premature births. The pharmaceutical companies ran ads in professional medical publications, like the
Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology,
recommending the drug for all women to produce “bigger and stronger babies.” Many doctors prescribed it as casually as a vitamin, to an estimated five million women around the world.
Five million!
This was despite evidence, right from the start, that hormone manipulation during pregnancy was dangerous. In the 1930s, researchers at Northwestern University Medical School gave doses of estrogen to pregnant rats and discovered that the babies were born with various deformities of their sexual organs. But those were rats.

Then, in 1971, a team of Boston doctors discovered that DES caused a rare form of cancer, called clear cell adenocarcinoma, in the vaginas of young women whose mothers had taken the drug during pregnancy. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, DES was finally exposed as a complete sham. That was the real tragedy. It was all hype. As early as 1952, researchers had found that DES did absolutely nothing to prevent miscarriages. On the contrary, a University of Chicago study showed a significant increase not only in miscarriages but also in premature births and infant deaths due to DES. Ironically, it was even used as a morning-after pill to terminate pregnancy. But again, this evidence was ignored.