Alex Blanchette’s recent book Porkopolis shows how human and animal lives become intertwined in a relationship of dependency that distorts both natures. How should we understand this type of production? What does it do to the people involved every step of the way with animals who no longer feed, procreate, give birth or die without humans intimately involved? Blanchette explores these questions from the vantage point of someone who did many aspects of the work and talked openly with people involved in many steps of the process. Do we treat the people involved as interchangeable, expendable and dependent as the industrial pigs they tend? What does that say about the food system we’ve created and which most of us rely upon and benefit from? … More Somos Puercos: Human-Animal Melding in the Meat Production Business (Porkopolis 2-Audio)

Alex Blanchette’s Porkopolis (2020, Duke University Press) has had more than the usual impact for a book that started out as a dissertation. Blanchette spent quite a bit of time embedding himself in the work of pork CAFO’s and processing facilities. As a result he has a book that goes beyond the usual animal or human welfare argument to expose the Taylorist/Fordist nature of pork production that yields cheap meat at the expense of dehumanizing workers and merging to the point of inextricability the manufactured pig and the manufacturing human. This video introduces who Blanchette is and some of the themes in the book. … More Porkopolis: The Human and Economic Tragedy of Manufactured Meat (1-Audio)