Porkopolis (eBook) by Alex BlanchetteISBN: 9781478012047
Publication Date: 2020-05-08
"PORKOPOLIS is an ethnographic account of hog production in "Dixon," a 15,000-resident agribusiness town in the Great Plains. In Dixon, where nearly 5,600,000 hogs are killed a year, human life has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of porcine production. Alex Blanchette accounts for the totalizing force of hog production by arguing that towns like Dixon represent a reinvestment in 20th-century notions of industry in a post-industrial United States. In practice, this means not only the taking up of industrial stock images, organization forms, and identities, but also an intense desire, on the part of agribusiness corporations, to achieve standardization-to create the "perfect" pig.