Alex Blanchette, cultural anthropologist and lecturer in anthropology and environmental studies at Tufts University, is a scholar of pork production.
As America’s pork industry is continually pushed to ever greater production, so are the human beings who labor to breed, care for, and slaughter these animals.
Blanchette, who gave a talk hosted by the Ethnography Workshop at Duke on November 4th, said there is an intimate relationship between pig and person. The quality of the factory farm worker’s life is tied to that of the porcine species.
Blanchette’s current work will be published in the 2020 ethnographic book – Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the “Factory” Farm. The book is focused on the consequences of human labor and identity that are bound to the pig – an animal which has become more industrialized over time due to corporations’ goal of a mass produced, standardized pig predictable in nature, uniform in existence, and easy to slaughter.
A common practice in factory farming is the ‘runting’ of litters, genetically making piglets smaller to increase the number each sow produces. But this practice has propelled a fundamental shift in the need for human workers to act as neonatal nurses, what Blanchette calls “external prosthetics,” to care for the newborns. Blanchette described one extraordinary worker responsible for taking care of piglet litters, saving the weak and deformed after birth. She has taken measures so drastic as to give a piglet mouth-to-mouth, incubate them in her pockets, and quickly form body-casts out of duct-tape for the small creatures. This worker has had the chance to study over 400,000 piglets in her seven-year career, encountering conditions of the pig body that no scientist has seen in real life.
Blanchette explained the active engagement required in any portion of the factory production. For example, people working with pregnant sows have to be extremely conscious of the way that the pigs are perceiving them to keep the sensory state of the mother pigs balanced. This means avoiding touching them unless work requires it, not wearing perfumes on the job, and taking overall care and precision in every motion throughout the workday. The danger is the risk of causing mass miscarriages and spontaneous abortions within a barn of sows because of their genetically engineered weakness and inability to handle stresses.
Blanchette said one worker could be seen standing in the exact same place over the course of 1,000 compiled picture frames. He developed this habit to prevent large hogs in open pens from knocking him down and biting his legs while he was working. This is something that Blanchette said he couldn’t manage for more than a few minutes even though he too has worked within the pork industry before.
Workers on slaughter and “disassembly” lines are responsible for making the same exact cut or slice 9,500 times a day.
And finally, the conformation of human labor to the precisions of the factory pig often does not stop at the end of the work shift. In rural factory farming areas, corporations try to re-engineer the human communities in which their workers live to further regulate the human body outside of work because of potential impacts on the pigs. For example, workers’ socialization has been monitored by companies in some cases due to the threat of communicable disease reaching the hogs through human kinship.
No worker knows the pig from birth to death, but for the individual portion of the pig’s life for which they are responsible, they are bound intimately and intricately to the hog, Blanchette said. These people are also disproportionately people of color and immigrant workers who are underpaid for how strenuous, demanding, and encapsulating this labor is. Workers in factory farms often have little protections, and Blanchette’s work gives new life to the consequences of industrial capitalism in America as the pig has become a product of vertical integration in rural communities.
We have long been moving at the speed limits of human physiology in the pork industry, Blanchette said. In 2011, one company’s annual effort to improve their corporation was to build a new human clinic on the jobsite to treat cuts and injuries acquired on the slaughter lines. This clinic was also responsible for assessing new hires in order to match the strongest part of their body to a place on the line where they would be most productive.
Factory farms are actively searching for new money to be found in the pig and to have a closed-loop system which uses every aspect of its life and death for profit. This has caused a deep integration of the “capital swine” into everyday human life for the laborers and communities sustained by these economic ventures.
The Trump administration recently removed standards for pork slaughter line speeds and ultimately reduced overall regulations. People like Blanchette are already considering something you too might be wondering, What happens next? Where does pork and the human labor behind it go from here?
Post by Cydney Livingston