The Crisis of Regeneration in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and All Over Creation

Ruth Ozeki’s first two novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2002), bring into focus the crisis of regeneration that humans, animals, and plants face alike. My Year of Meats exposes and indicts the global meat industry for its association with contamination, deformity, disease, and violence, all of which impact life’s fertility. All Over Creation explores the conflicts of biodiversity versus monoculture and fecundity versus biotechnological control by presenting the quandaries regarding genetically modified potatoes in Idaho. In these contexts, Ozeki creates women characters who bear the sorrow and despair of being childless due to their exposure to toxins and other environmental contaminations. Her portrayals of meat and potato farming catalog the devastating assaults of patriarchy and capitalism against Earth and its inhabitants. This essay focuswa on the subject of infertility in these two novels. Moving from the juxtaposition of animal farming with women’s infertility to that of potato farming with women’s infertility, these two novels represent their author’s unswerving endeavor to deconstruct patriarchal dualism and to unite humans and Earth in their common crisis of regeneration. Hence, this essay argues that by drawing trans-species parallels between women and animals, women and plants, Ozeki exposes and condemns patriarchal and capitalist violence that is putting life’s regeneration in peril.

Professional journalistic routines and the protest paradigm: The Big Potato Swap in traditional and alternative media

This article discusses the news coverage of a highly mediatised protest action which took place in early May 2011 in Flanders, Belgium. A social movement called the Field Liberation Movement rallied against a field trial of a scientific research project testing genetically modified potatoes. Seeking to understand how implicit patterns associated with the protest paradigm influence media representations of this ‘Big Potato Swap’, this article discusses the results of a qualitative content analysis of news coverage by two Flemish quality newspapers and one alternative news website. We conclude by discussing to what extent strategies assigned to the protest paradigm are in fact a product of normative journalistic routines. Different journalistic approaches to coverage of protest may be interpreted as distinct journalistic paradigms. As a result, any criticism of protest paradigm mechanisms in news reporting should be seen as part of a broader critique of prevailing journalistic formats and practices.