What is the real story behind supermarket bacon and pork chops? How much do we know about the people who labor to bring meaty meals to our plates? Even if we swear off eating meat, are we still implicated in a system of factory farming? Building on a two-year ethnography of the industrial pig set in a rural American community, Alex Blanchette seeks to answer these questions in his book, Porkopolis.
Porkopolis has its share of muckraking details. Blanchette carefully researched the pigs and people in a town he calls “Dixon,” centered on “Dover Foods”—an agribusiness firm that kills 5.6 million hogs annually. This translates into one pig killed every 3 seconds, 2.8 million pounds of meat shipped transnationally, and 5.5 million pounds of biological matter moving through the Dover system daily. Readers learn that breeding sows “never see daylight except through tiny windows on the barn’s periphery” (p. 95),...
University of California Press