Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm

by Alex Blanchette

In the 1990s a small midwestern American town approved the construction of a massive pork complex, where almost 7 million hogs are birthed, raised, and killed every year. In Porkopolis Alex Blanchette explores how this rural community has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of corporate pigs. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Blanchette immerses readers into the workplaces that underlie modern meat, from slaughterhouses and corporate offices to artificial insemination barns and bone-rendering facilities. He outlines the deep human-hog relationships and intimacies that emerge through intensified industrialization, showing how even the most mundane human action, such as a wayward touch, could have serious physical consequences for animals. Corporations' pursuit of a perfectly uniform, standardized pig—one that can yield materials for over 1000 products—creates social and environmental instabilities that transform human lives and livelihoods. Throughout Porkopolis, which includes dozens of images by award-winning photographer Sean Sprague, Blanchette uses factory farming to rethink the fraught state of industrial capitalism in the United States today.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Food, Animals, Agriculture, Ecology, Ethnography

320 pages, Hardcover

Published April 17, 2020

Reviews

[Harris]

It's hard to know where to start with this excellent book. There are so many big ideas here and they're all brilliantly executed with precise logic and prose.

Instead of writing another ~shocking expose~ on the animal and human abuse that happens inside of factory farms, the focus here seems to be more on the postmodern condition that allows these things to happen or even demands them. Blanchette, of course, still displays more respect and familiarity with the workers and pigs he is writing about than much of the standard expose writing.

I miss a lot of the references here to anthropologists and theorists in animal studies and meatpacking, but a lot of the book is informed by Silvia Federici and Donna Haraway. This comes through in the way Blanchette talks about the human/animal distinction and the commune.

It's a really thoughtful examination of standardization and the myth of deindustrialization. His eventual refutation of the Anthropocene as a result of the "logic that leads writers to see industrialism as signaling the collective human 'domination' of the planet" blew my mind.

He concludes with this:

"Rather than allowing the use of all of the pig to stand as a neutral good, perhaps what we need is a positive politics of inefficiency. It is true that there is virtually no waste of the hog's body parts in factory farming -- outside, of course, of externalized nitrates that are creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and antibiotic resistance genes that are transforming the nature of microbial life. What should be questioned is the profound amount of human energy, creativity, and science that is needed to keep this system afloat...This is the symptom and sign of our times: it has to come to feel radical to advocate merely leaving something unworked. But I do think that this, ultimately, is what we do need to demand -- the right to be "un-efficient" creatures. It is not wasteful or lazy if every dimension of our everyday life and routine labor does not course with capitalist value. It means that we are, as both human and non-human beings, more than simply economic creatures. That is the demand for human and animal life that is truly incompatible le with the logic of late industrial factory farms."

I'm probably not doing this book the justice it deserves but I was really floored while reading it and it's probably the best bit of theory I've read this year along with Christina Sharpe. I love when a writer can simultaneously make the world make more and less sense to me.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn this book was amazing.

My boyfriend bought this for me for my birthday a couple of years ago. I had quit eating pork and was obsessed. I had to learn everything I could about pigs, pig farming and pig production. At first I was hesitant to read this thinking it was going to be praising the mass exploitation of these animals, but I was pleasantly surprised. Alex Blanchette takes a look into factory farms through the human point of view showing just how much human lives are just as exploited as the pigs’. Letting us peak behind the curtain of how human and pig have become biological machines, changing our and their bodies in uncomfortable ways.
I’m not going to lie I was extremely upset with the picture he paints. How the pork industry has made it its goal to find a place for every single part of the hog to melt seamlessly within our day to day lives from medicine to art supplies. It feels invasive and depressing. In the epilogue the author notes that the point of this book was not to make us feel “despair”…too late.
In conclusion this is a fascinating look into the world of the industrial hog showing us every facet of how the pig has seeped into our human world and how it affects us. This is definitely my favourite of all the books I’ve read this year. ❤️🐖

[Blake Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Succeeds at being so much more than an exposé on the problems brought by the industrialization of pork, but shows industrialization as a broader intra-active multispecies biopolitical entanglement that cannot be properly seen or dealt with in a compartmentalized form.

[Stephanie Wojciakowski]

super interesting and a little bit gross

[Michele Giacomini · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ethnozoologic picture Blanchette draws in his work still present itself to my eyes as a story of human mastery of hogs but it would be only that in the sole case the U.S pork industry was involving a simple process possible to summarize in just three steps: breeding pigs – butchering pigs – selling pork. But it is far from being this simple. It's also a story illustrating how human mastery or domination of nature assumes different and more devastating forms the more and more economic value gets attached to every part of human and non-human life alike in the endless march of capital expansion. It is also an account of how first the industrial scale human domination of other species and the global ecosystem as a whole is not “human” as a whole of at least, how some are perpetuating this domination on a gargantuan scale while many others are little to not contributing to it as ultimately human domination and ultimately destruction of nature is a byproduct of the tyranny of man on man. Throughout the entire book Blanchette tells the story of the industrial pig, not an hog, not sus scrofa, but of a capitalistically and industrially generated animal that gets more and more bizarre and grotesque the more is being of Porkopolis you read. One of the key words of Blanchette entire work is standardization; itself being the core premise of high industrialist mass production and mass consumption. The echoes of Fordism are rather loud in the entire work. Blanchette also uses his deep dissection and analysis or the life and death cicle of the stardardized industrial pig integrated with the exploration of the ethnography proper of the human rings in the chain (breeders, butchers, packaging workers and plenty of other, sometimes obscure, roles in the advanced capitalist pork chain) as a demonstration that, despite the frequency and spreading of claims reporting the postindustrialist stage of western and especially American economy. and society , that standardized industrialism is still an unfinished project, we are all but at the end of the era marked by the rise of the Fordist model. True, the emergence and dominance of globalized forms of digital entrepreneurialism and financial accumulation may suggest that life in the western world is now postindustrial but intensified, mass industrial production and consumption as the immense American midwest pork economy testifies is at its peak and also marked by worn out infrastructures and paradigms of thought, these ones actually being relics from the fist half of twentieth century industrial ruins. There is more: as infrastructures, bridges, chemical factories, nuclear reactors increasingly go awry due to lack of maintenance or a changing planetary climate we are all at risk of experiencing industrialism (including the strata of society living far from its core) as these systems harm more intimately life and health . We saw the powerful manifestations of the risk attached to industrial meat and American animality during the 2020's Covid-19 pandemic where, in the country with the world's highest death and infection toll particularly devastating outbreaks were recorded in meat processing plants . Sociologist Ulrich Beck's theory of Risk Society is echoing powerfully here and Blanchette underlines how in terms of injuries, the slaughterhouse has historically been one of the most dangerous places to work at in the U.S and for this reason frequently falls under the scrutiny of both scholars and human rights NGOs. Most exposes of meatpackaging horror stories involving damage to workers someone that has lost a limb or developed a worklife destroying carpal tunnel syndrome yet, these stories are rare and Dover Foods is not teeming with amputations and deaths it is instead teeming with “mundane” and not life threatening injuries and with strains both physical and mental . To the list Blanchette compiles of the health hazards and the factors modifying human bodies the alienating and standardized activity in the pork chain we can add, and again the global events of the year in which the book was published are the demonstration of that, the biological threats of illnesses and epidemics, including the spreading of zoonotic pathogens (Pathogens that manage to operate a jump of species and start infecting an additional one other than the ones they have historically been able to infect). But ultimately, Blanchette's book is not an ethnographic account reporting the class, racial and gendered dimensions of the abuses on animals and also humans happening inside factory farms, yes, this elements are important in his work but it is a carefully crafted dissection and scrutiny of the postmodern, late capitalist conditions and anthropopoietic processes that not only allows, but demands for them to happen and enstablished the series standardized industrial processes in the American meat industry as the ideal and most efficient way to administer the demand for production and consumption, not for the purpose of satiating society's hunger and need but with the purpose of efficiency and capital accumulation. During the last chapter and the epilogue he refutes the concept of Anthropocene as the result of the logic that leads critics of industrialism to see it as the expression of collective human domination of the planet as a whole as this domination is far from collective and also far from being ultimately human. He concludes the last chapter writing:

"Rather than allowing the use of all of the pig to stand as a neutral good, perhaps what we need is a positive politics of inefficiency. It is true that there is virtually no waste of the hog's body parts in factory farming --outside, of course, of externalized nitrates that are creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and antibiotic resistance genes that are transforming the nature of microbial life. What should be questioned is the profound amount of human energy, creativity, and science that is needed to keep this system afloat[...]From this perspective, the value of small and local farms is not just their agrarian worth or support for rural communities. It is that they nurture animals in a fashion whereby every moment of their lives, and every microgram of their bodies, is not saturated by economic value. This is the symptom and sign of our times: it has to come to feel radical to advocate merely leaving something unworked. But I do think that this, ultimately, is what we do need to demand -- the right to be "un-efficient" creatures. It is not wasteful or lazy if every dimension of our everyday life and routine labor does not course with capitalist value. It means that we are, as both human and non-human beings, more than simply economic creatures. That is the demand for human and animal life that is truly incompatible with the logic of late industrial factory farms."
Because virtually no parts of the hog's body get wasted in factory farming, as the non edible byproducts of the slaughter are used in a huge variety of non-alimentary consumer goods and the non-consumable parts of the swines skeletons are accumulated way less thickly in the Earth's crust that other domestic species' skeletons destined to become fossils, the missing mass of hog's bones in the Earth's crust in the far future will tell a weird and obscure facet of the time period associated with the proposed name of Anthropocene as the skeleton of the domestic pig will not be able to assume the role of a trademark fossil as the future fossils of other species that were used by humans as a mass food source will do. Ultimately what Blanchette argues for runs far deeper than the mere criticism of human mastery over other animals and the standardization of living beings into consumer products the changes in whose bodies are the result of shifts in human tastes , he shows how the high industrialization here examined is not only a story of domination but also one of desperation in which agribusiness have to go through gargantuan efforts in order to keep the machine afloat and attach forms of value everywhere they can, practices at the same time unsustainable but necessary within a neoliberal system that will implode in the moment its growth is permanently crippled. At this point calling for deindustrialization as a positive political project becomes needed, but this must not mean economic precarity and lack of livelihood for most working people and a good place to start thinking about what positive deindustrialization may look like is the dissection and deconstruction of the standardized industrial pig, as this animal has been the subject of a meticulous and unnatural industrial engineering process and this process is not very different from what most of humanity has being going through in the past centuries learning to relocate the hogs outside of the industry, outside of economic value, outside of meat might help to shed light on a vaster post-capitalist life project

[becca barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was extremely moving for me personally. I thought that academically, it was a very well written, insightful ethnography that drew upon useful anthropological theory and frameworks to illustrate the main points. Ethically, as an individual consumer in a western context, it generated a lot of uncomfortability in the practices in which I contribute to.

Blanchette details his time at Dover, an industrial pig facility, in Dixon, USA. He takes the reader through the full process of the pig processing, integrating the perceptions and views of the workers and wider community, as well as his own.

One of the main arguments is how capitalism has transformed the hog into a completely industrialised product, and uses every thinkable prospect to maximise profit from it - whether this be in breeding capacity, slaughter process efficiency, or organisation of the human workers. He details how the bodies of human workers are governed, abused, and regulated in order to maintain the maximum productive output of the company. A human body becomes valued less than maintaining the health of the pig (when it ‘needs’ to be ‘healthy’) and the efficient death of the pig (when it ‘needs’ to be dead). The whole species of the pig equates to a higher worth than the individual body of the worker, despite an individual pig itself being of little value. The complex workings of capitalism in this industrialised process and consumerist society is demonstrated through this specific production line.

This really created an ethical whirlwind for myself, as well as a spur of anthropological thought and critique about how our society operates.

[Stefani · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author paints a picture of a vicious cycle of interdependency and profit maximization endorsed by corporations intent on squeezing dollars from every square inch of a pig. From genetically engineering pig uterus' to be larger to accommodate more babies — cutting down on the cost of feeding and caring for additional animals — to simulating the mating process with human workers artificially inseminating sows, the industrialized farming industry has spent decades creating animals that are “standardized” to their specifications, at the lowest cost possible. This intensive form of farming demands a focus that takes a toll both on the workers who toil day and night under the relentless physical strain required to maintain this level of control, as well as the pigs who have nearly every natural impulse representing the variability of biology, repressed. These bizarre “frankenpigs”— a mixture of optimal genetics and proscribed feed/vitamins/antibiotics —exist less as sentient beings, then as “widgets” engineered purely to serve humans at any cost. Less an expose into the abuses of factory farming, and more of a criticism against the capitalist view that everything that can be exploited for profit should be. My only criticism would be that this is an academic text, so much of the language was difficult to fully comprehend.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will never be able to look at anything the same after reading this. This book does an amazing job portraying the intimate human animal relationships that happen on a factory farm and paints a grotesquely beautiful picture of the way love restructures what it is to be human in relation to the industrial hog. I never thought that I would learn so much about the root of industrialization in thinking about porcine farming but this capitalist pig was the perfect example of what industry is doing to American culture.

[Bo Wang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning ethnography by Alex! Nuanced, emotional, insightful, and expansively interpretive—all you would want to read in a well-done ethnography.
Particularly impressed by the juxtaposition of industrial hog biology and human labor, the serious take on Marxist notion of surplus value and machine, the feminist critique of emotion required in capitalist animality.
Very illuminating on vital matter, entanglement, and other buzz philosophical concepts with ethnographic details.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not for everyone - but if it is for you, it will blow your mind page after page after page. Tactfully written, poetically present, industrious in its scope but not in its affect. Ugh, I could rave about this one to the right audience for a long time. Going in the "supply chain" section of my qualifying exam even though deep down I know it is a portrait of the midwest.

[Ryan Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is simply one of the most incredible books about the way that modern capitalism shapes the lives of workers and infuses itself into all areas of existence I have ever read. Outstanding. Cannot say enough about how great this book is. It will change the way you view the relation between labor and capital forever.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book bangs so hard that I had to tone down its section in my dissertation's literature review. Not a comfortable read, but this is the book you should read if you want to understand factory farms in the United States. This is ethnographic scholarship at its best.

5/5. Read this.

[Rebecca Ott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Illuminating, riveting, terrifying.

[Izzy G]

Haunting, do not read before you eat dinner...