In an effort to meaningfully post my way through my PhD, I will be sharing a series of critical response essays to this blog. The first three installments come from a directed readings organized by myself and my colleague Adriana DiSilvestro, along with Dillon Mahmoudi and Dave Lansing. We are meeting every two weeks during the Fall ’22 semester and discussing selected monographs and essays. The themes are broadly capitalism, life, and infrastructure.
At the beginning of the semester when we were choosing these readings, Dave said this book is more about the “pork” than the “opolis”. However, I think there are a lot of insights for urban geographers from Blanchette’s account of porcine urbanization — this new-ish and especially rank agglomeration of precarious labor, agriculture, industrial production and culture. The overall takeaway from the book is that pork is as embedded in our lives as carbon and labor power. Blanchette highlights a number of “moments” in this process where pigs gain a certain kind of machine-like agency and have determining power over the movements of people. He takes aim particularly at liberal/journalistic frames of industrial farming as somehow an aberration; but what Blanchette shows is that industrial ag is just one window through which you can observe capital accelerating and occasionally stumbling toward accumulation – emphasizing again and again, for example, that in the aggregate the cost of pork products is getting lower, driving the search for more applications for pork products. This has even led Dixon (the pseudonymous town in Blanchette’s study) to function as a closed system, where there is very little solid waste generated from actual pork production; blood gets reused to nurture suckling piglets, bone is ground up into cement compounds etc.
I was often reminded of Nature’s Metropolis, but Blanchette’s study area “Dixon” (possibly Guymon, OK?) is like an inversion of Cronon’s Chicago. The “extent” of Nature’s Metropolis is enormous – it is at once a story of the Great Plains, the Great Lakes and the city positioned between them. Dixon is like the neutron star/black hole phase of urbanization that Cronon studied. There is no railroad network or canals needed to bring hogs to Dixon, as they live out their entire lives shuffled from barn to barn in a 100 mile radius; one sow can produce 2 or 3 times as many piglets in a year than in the early 20th century, netting a great savings in square footage. This intense, postmodern concentration (it’s right there in CAFO acronym) of pork production is no less exploitative or environmentally burdensome than its modern forebear, it just happens to be sunk in a much smaller geographic area and has “innovated” its waste into thousands of other uses, dispersing it as it obscures its impact. While production takes place in a very small area, various crises on the labor side over the last 20 years have sent the industry searching far afield for workers – for some reason, the flows between Miami, FL and the OK panhandle seem especially strong.
There is also an interesting moral/cultural geography as well, with reverberations in pork production. For example, Dixon is also home to cattle feed lots, requiring work that is largely outdoors and that still uses horses. There is a segmentation of the labor force in Dixon, with the outdoor, horseback riding pomo cowboys of the cattle feed lots receiving higher starting wages than pig workers. There is the culture and rituals of company-town Christmas parties and livestock auctions, and the subtle discontent of anti-industry pamphlets and bumper stickers; the Christmas party is one of few places the pods and hierarchies of biosecure pork are suspended, allowing families and coworkers to intermingle.
This intensification and concentration is never totally complete, however – for example, despite the wide use of “weights” or other ways to simplify and streamline artificial insemination, one of Blanchette’s participants, Felipe, insists on more specialized and labor/time-intensive modes of AI.
Turnstile Jumper 