A Review of Alex Blanchette, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, 320 pp.

Abstract

The book depicts a dynamic experiment in industrializing the pork industry in the post-industrial United States. The author demonstrates how in the heart of the Global North corporations seek to create and maintain the life of a standardized industrial pig which serves as a source material for more than a thousand commodities. “Porkopolis” introduces the reader to the workplaces of a factory farm that changes the daily lives of workers and the hierarchy of humans and non-humans. Thereby it opens the possibility of reimagining life shared with other species. A rich ethnography, equally sensitive to both phenomenology and the political economy of labor, challenges some aspects of contemporary Euro-American common sense. Industrialization as a basic feature of the capitalist mode of production still plays a fundamental role in agriculture, and changing the basis of industrial food production is not possible by transforming individual consumption practices.