Book ID: CBB310405339

Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (2020)

unapi

Alex Blanchette (Author)


Duke University Press


Publication Date: 2020
Physical Details: 320
Language: English

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Jamie Kreiner (2021) Review of "Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism". Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (pp. 553-565). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB310405339/

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Authors & Contributors
Curry, Helen Anne
Lopes, Maria-Aparecida
Specht, Joshua Albert
Ben Nobbs-Thiessen
Fleischman, Thomas
Clifford, Jim
Concepts
Industrial agriculture
Livestock
Meat industry and trade
Agriculture
Human-animal relationships
Breeding
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
18th century
20th century, early
Places
United States
Great Britain
Australia
Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
London (England)
New Zealand
Institutions
United States. Dept. of Agriculture
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