Porkopolis
American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm
Duke University Press · Print & ebook · May 8, 2020
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.
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- Who it’s for
- A close look at how factory farming reshapes work, human-animal relations, and rural life.
- Themes
- Factory farming, Human-hog relationships, Industrial capitalism
- Genres
- How Cultures Work, Agriculture & Food Systems, Agriculture & Food Policy
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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.
Continue reading
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.
Inside Industrial Meat
A close look at how factory farming reshapes work, human-animal relations, and rural life.
Come here for
- The workplaces behind modern meat, from slaughterhouses to breeding barns
- A grounded account of corporate standardization and its human costs
Expect
- Ethnographic detail drawn from more than two years of fieldwork
- Images accompanying a study of industrial capitalism and factory farming
Where it sits
| Agriculture & Food Systems | 84% |
|---|---|
| How Cultures Work | 53% |
| Agriculture & Food Policy | 33% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- How Cultures Work
- Rural Life
- Agriculture & Food Systems
- Authors
- Alex Blanchette
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Published
- May 8, 2020
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Factory farming · Human-hog relationships · Industrial capitalism
- Reading lane
- How Cultures Work