Porkopolis

“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.”

"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.”

“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

“Porkopolis is a monumental achievement and an engrossing read. It should be a lasting contribution to our understanding of the changing face of both industrial and agricultural production in our fraught present.” — Jan Dutkiewicz, Journal of Peasant Studies

“[Porkopolis] make[s] clear that pigs’ histories matter not simply because they are geographically and economically expansive. They matter because, over the centuries, pigs have reconfigured and are still reconfiguring humans’ lives—not just by feeding us but also by changing the ways we work and think and exist.” — Jamie Kreiner, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences

“Porkopolis is recommended reading for anybody who is interested in agricultural policy or issues in the industry. It provides an inside view of what both the people and the animals experience.” — Temple Grandin, Journal of Anthropological Research

“Blanchette’s project [is] to carry out an unflinching, comprehensive, and empirically rich accounting of the industrial pig. . . . Porkopolis is an academically oriented text, but Blanchette is a skilled writer and storyteller, and he allows the stories of people living and working in Dixon to shine through the pages.” — Josée Johnston, Gastronomica

"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 Dupré, 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

"What is refreshing about Porkopolis is its refusal to narrate this story as a simple matter of good and evil. The thoroughness with which this study is conducted reveals details that defy simplistic normative judgment." — Brandon Hunter-Pazzara, ILR Review

"Porkopolis works to understand the industrial, nature, human, animal, and many other categories through the work of both hogs and humans while becoming painfully aware of the pervasiveness of the industry even in the book’s material form which opens up the space to imagine agricultures not seen so far." — Ramsha Usman, Society for the Anthropology of Work

"As Porkopolis makes visible the detailed processes that capitalizes on every part of the pig “which never really lives or dies” (p. 219) and contests the fixation on human diet as a justice solution, it accumulates, as part of its method, a suspicion of wastage and late-industrial efficiency." — Pooja Nayak, Society for the Anthropology of Work

"Porkopolis does not present any easy pathway to abolish the ideology of growthism. Nor is there any. It does, however, provoke creative imaginings of how to organize our economy differently and help identify the requisites that must be met." — Atmaezer H. Simanjuntak, Society for the Anthropology of Work

"This book is not a prescriptive how-to but rather a compelling why-to." — Kate Elliott, Society for the Anthropology of Work

"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