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.
Industry Reviews
"Porkopolis is a rigorous and insightful ethnography of food production that connects the politics of labor to ambitious theorizations of political economy and biopolitical governance. Beautifully written and highly accessible, Porkopolis is a field-defining work in animal studies, the anthropology of labor, and food studies. An outstanding book." - Gabriel N. Rosenberg, author of (The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America) "In Porkopolis, the industrial pig is not just vertically integrated; it is pervasive, conditioning hog and human bodies and saturating workers' social lives and living spaces. Exquisitely researched and indelibly written, Alex Blanchette's arresting ethnography challenges us to see industrial meat as a new biopolitical regime, the next chapter in capitalism's quest to dominate nature by standardizing life." - Heather Paxson, author of (The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America) "As a human-animal researcher, I found this book exciting in its examination of how labor and class shapes human nonhuman entanglement in the industrial setting, and the novel employment of multispecies sensibilities to offer an alternative perspective on the factory farm. Porkopolis might also be read as a twenty-first century world-making process of domestication, radically co-shaping environments, pigs, humans, and other species in the process." - Paul G. Keil (Anthropology Book Forum) "What is remarkable about Porkopolis is that Blanchette never makes the predictable point but instead uses his thorough ethnography to question many of the taken-for-granted assumptions both popular media and the scholarly literature have made about factory farms. In the process, he has generated the beginning steps toward a new approach toward understanding the relations between industrial forms of capitalism and nature." - Ilana Gershon (Current Anthropology) "The clarity and analytical power of Porkopolis are impressive achievements. . . . It is not surprising to learn that Blanchette's peers consider him one of the finest ethnographers of his generation. The book is crafted with a perspicacity and empathy reminiscent of Munro's short stories." - Troy Vettese (Boston Review) "An even-handed exploration of an issue usually dominated by extremes. . . . That said, even Blanchette's moral generosity and even-handed treatment of the pork industry cannot powder and perfume the everyday horrors contained within. . . . Blanchette may not have set out to write an argument for de-industrializing pigs, but he achieved it." - Jennifer Graham (The Hippo) "The book obliges the thoughtful reader to ponder how this remarkable departure from normal biological life could ever have come about-all for the sake of cheap meat and profit-and what we might need to do (if ever we could) about changing it. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals." - J. A. Mather (Choice) "Porkopolis is very well written, powerful, and provocative and is an exceptionally insightful look at industrial capitalism through the lens of human-animal relations. It offers a truly unique perspective into the world that industrial farming has made and remade." - Steve Striffler (American Anthropologist) "Porkopolis is a triumph. It is exceptionally readable and engaging in spite of the gravity of its subject matter. It is also creative and challenging in the most haunting and curious ways." - Claire Bunschoten (Social Text) "Blanchette's ethnography ... demonstrates the ways in which the modern pork industry has reshaped the rural American workforce as well as economic and social relationships.... Porkopolis is a masterful piece of multi-sited research." - Jon Wolseth (American Ethnologist) "Alex Blanchette's Porkopolis is an incredible ethnographic achievement.... The book's commitment to an ambitious theoretical project, its inviting prose that balances precision and readability, and its sharply described ethnographic insights all work flawlessly." - Andrea Rissing and Nicholas C. Kawa (Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment) "There are many angles from which to approach Alex Blanchette's sweeping, paradigm defining and redefining, and prescient ethnography.... Porkopolis will assuredly become essential reading in many areas of anthropology." - Carolyn Barnes and Peter Benson (Anthropological Quarterly) "The pig's body is shaped by the market and the prices of its various parts. But more shockingly, as Blanchette argues, much the same is true of the bodies of the workers sucked into the maw of this gigantic meat machine. It would be hard to find a more compelling critique of contemporary capitalist exploitation of what was once part of the natural world." - John Dupre (Los Angeles Review of Books) "Porkopolis provides a substantial and nuanced explanation of industrialized pork production that calls into question the collective societal energy invested into life-forms best suited for capitalist extraction. . . . Blanchette makes numerous contributions to sociology, anthropology, and more-than-human geographies." - Michaela Hoffelmeyer (Agriculture and Human Values) "This book pulls off the fine balancing act of evoking the dystopic world of industrial meat production with unflinching clarity without ever descending into sensationalism. . . . Rich ethnography is woven into every chapter of this book: one can almost smell, hear, and feel the pigs and people that drive Blanchette's sharp analysis. Thanks to a well-curated series of more than fifty striking images by photographer Sean Sprague, readers also get a good sense of what industrial pig farming looks like." - James Staples (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)
