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

Workers in a modern pork processing plant's gestation division cannot make eye contact with pregnant sows and absolutely should never accidently brush against them. Human eye contact and touch risks upsetting the animals and kicking off a chain reaction that results in a complete loss of thousands of pregnancies. The tightly packed sows each have so many fetuses that they will miscarry if agitated, and their confinement makes them unfamiliar with human bodies. Thus, no eye contact or touch. This is how Alex Blanchette opens his book.To say that Porkopolis is a difficult book to review is an understatement. It demands the reader take an unflinching view (recalling the sows in the birthing cages) at the totalizing nature of industrial processing. The book is filled with intimate stories and insightful analysis that upend the staid and standard historical accounts of industrial meat production that drain the visceral elements from the accounts. But this is not a work of history. It is an "ethnography of that industrial pig" around whom the industry bends (4). As a work of ethnography and not history, Porkopolis takes us to the biological processes and the animals that are the core of capital-intensive production systems. This unsettling scholarship argues that we all serve the industrial pig, resulting in a totalizing "pigification" of life under capitalism (243). Pork is not just a commodity; it is us.How does Blanchette reach that conclusion? It starts with reframing the old story of industrial meat production as a story of human innovation and the total conquest of nature. The book illustrates how the hog itself is the center of the process that turns millions of pigs into millions of pounds of meat and a thousand other commodities that find usage in just about everything from concrete to paper, to medicine, to humans themselves. For Blanchette, there is an "animality" at the center of this process. Because corporations cannot sever the pig from their bodies and their bodies from their biology, pork remains tied to pigs and the limits of their bodies. Turning porcine bodies into economically usable products also requires turning human bodies into a means for producing and reproducing the industrial pig, thus the irreducible animality of the pig demands that human labor and capital serve the industrial pig. In his telling, all humans are in some way lashed to the machine that churns out pork and the other more profitable commodities that we consume (to the point where meat is an afterthought). The factory laborers experience this more than any other people, but the managers and corporate leaders who are responsible for this process are pigified as well. His book is a story of a totalizing industrial economy that has us all serving the needs of the factory farm as standardized life smooths out production speeds and grows profits. In short, the more that life is standardized and mechanized, the more that humans are entangled.From 2009 to 2014, Blanchette conducted research at "Dover Foods" and worked at every sector of the processing plant. He also interviewed workers and managers about their experiences in a city that he calls "Dixon." This is anthropology, and, as such, his main sources are interviews with people and participation in the work. He takes us through the steps of birth, rearing, slaughter, disassembly, and then follows where the body parts go after disassembly. Pigification emerges as he takes the reader through the steps of the production process, which is how the book is organized. In this way, the book itself is pigified by the animality of the hog. Since his research occurred on-site and through interviews, his analysis provides an intimate picture of reproduction and production.Worth noting are the excellent and vibrant photographs that Sean Sprague took during two separate trips with Blanchette. While the company restricted what could be photographed, the pictures help show elements of the process that words alone could not completely capture and even offer alternative ways of seeing the processing. In the end, there is a lot to say about this book, with this review only having enough space to skim the surface. You should pick up this book, and if this review causes you to skip it, then I have done you a great disservice. In summary, historians should read Porkopolis and meditate on its insights.