October
14, 2004: All Over Creation is Ruth Ozeki’s
second novel, and the second to take aim at a U.S. industrial
food system run amok. While the sins of the beef industry
were just one of several themes running through her first
effort, My Year of Meats, Ozeki keeps a steady bead
on the transgressions of transgenic crop science in All
Over Creation.
Like Ozeki, and the character of her first novel, All
Over Creation’s main character is Japanese-American.
Switching between first and third person, the novel tracks
the life of Yumi Fuller, from infant resting in the hulking
hands of her Idaho conventional potato farmer father to prodigal
daughter reluctantly returning—following a 25 year absence—to
conservative Liberty Falls to care for her ailing parents.
Despite the publisher’s assurance that “…any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,
events, or locals is entirely coincidental,” the arch-evil
biotech company Cynaco peddling its NuLife pesticide-enhanced
potatoes to Idaho farmers bears strong resemblance to goings
on—not to mention key players and products—in
industrial agriculture. (Terminator plant sterilization technology
and Michael Pollan’s brilliant New York Times treatise
“Playing God in the Garden” are also referenced.)
Character development is superb, even if the plot coincidences—like
those espoused in the publisher’s notes—are a
bit suspect.
Eliot Rhodes, Liberty Falls’ hippie history teacher
(he needed a draft deferment) first deflowers and impregnates
14-year-old Yumi, then leaves her out on the streets to endure
the first harsh year of a quarter-century rift with the father
she once idolized. If that’s not enough to make readers
detest Rhodes, fate sends him unwillingly back to Liberty
Falls as Cynaco’s shallow spinmeister—unwilling,
that is, until he finds out Yumi is also back in town.
Enter the Seeds of Resistance, a band of young environmental
activists—sort of a cross between the Scooby-Doo gang
and Earth First!—who travel around in a veggie-oil powered
Winnebago staging supermarket guerilla theatre and wreaking
havoc on anything GMO.
In the interim between Yumi’s departure from Liberty
Falls and her return, her father, Lloyd Fuller, has retired
from conventional potato farming and taken a keen interest
in his wife Momoko’s small heirloom seed business with
evangelical fervor.
“I used to farm potatoes, and I have witnessed firsthand
the demise of the American family farm,” Fuller writes
to his customers. “I have seen how large corporations
hold the American farmer in thrall, prisoners to their chemical
tyranny and their buyouts of politicians and judges.”
(Amen, Mr. Fuller.)
It’s sentiments like these, and particularly Lloyd
Fuller’s disdain for genetic engineering—he’s
got special distain in his ailing ticker for Terminator technology—that
put the Seeds of Resistance on a course toward Liberty Falls
and their chosen guru. They’re bound to clash with Lloyd’s
neighbor Will Quinn—husband to Yumi’s childhood
chum Cass—who has just planted three experimental acres
of NuLifes.
Dragging to town three kids from her Hawaiian hideaway—none
of whom share the same father—Yumi Fuller isn’t
exactly Florence Nightingale. She’s not ready for the
responsibility of caretaker—and is not quick to take
any blame for the fractured relationship with her parents
as place gives way to memories—so she welcomes the Seeds
of Resistance when they show up in the Fuller driveway and
offer to help with nursing her parents and with the seed business.
Just when the reader begins to think that Yumi could not
be any more irresponsible and that Eliot Rhodes couldn’t
be any more of a scumbag, the two “discover” each
other once again and begin a sordid series of rendezvous in
his hotel room that leave the barren Cass holding the baby
and Yumi’s 14-year-old son Phoenix fuming.
All comes to a head when the Seeds hold a teach-in at the
Fuller farm—and a civil disobedience action next door—that
brings down the heat in more ways than one. But like the mythical
bird from which Yumi borrows her sons name, healing and resolution
rise from the ashes of tragedy—along with a good dose
of karma for the bad guy.
The fact that Ruth Ozeki has largely done her homework—with
rare exception; she erroneously places the University of Oregon
in Portland—makes her work an entertaining read for
folks who watch the real story play out in supermarkets and
across the American landscape (though, of course, the parallels
are only coincidence).
With her second book, Ozeki has firmly established herself
in the genre of food-politics fiction (Barbara Kingsolver
gives the effort exuberant endorsement in the jacket-cover
notes). All Over Creation offers an entertaining
primer for the uninitiated and an abundance of inspiration
for life’s many challenges to any reader. (Anybody know
where to get a used diesel-powered Winnebago?) 
Dan Sullivan is senior editor at The New Farm.
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