Review of "Porkopolis: American animality, standardized life, and the factory farm"

Alex Blanchette's Porkopolis offers a compelling ethnography of pig life and death as part of the industrial food system. Blanchette challenges readers to think about factory farms not only as spaces of domination but also also sites where intimacy and exploitation unfold in complicated ways.

Primary Pandemic Prevention

Over the last few decades, hundreds of human pathogens have emerged at a rate unprecedented in human history. Emerged from where? Mostly from animals. The AIDS virus is blamed on the butchering of primates in the African bushmeat trade, we created mad cow disease when we turned cows into carnivores and cannibals, and SARS and COVID-19 have been traced back to the exotic wild animal trade. Our last pandemic, swine flu in 2009, arose not from some backwater wet market in Asia, however. It was largely made-in-the-USA on pig production operations in the United States. In this new Age of Emerging Diseases, there are now billions of animals overcrowded and intensively confined in filthy factory farms for viruses to incubate and mutate within. Today’s industrial farming practices have given viruses billions more spins at pandemic roulette. How can we stop the emergence of pandemic viruses in the first place? Whenever possible, treat the cause. The largest and oldest association of public health professionals in the world, the American Public Health Association, has called for a moratorium on factory farming for nearly two decades. Indeed, factory farms are a public health menace. In addition to discontinuing the intensive confinement practices of animal agriculture, we should continue to research, develop, and invest in innovative plant-based and cultivated meat technologies to move away from raising billions of feathered and curly-tailed test tubes for viruses with pandemic potential to mutate within.

The Vanishing Ethics of Husbandry

The ethics of food production should include philosophical discussion of the condition or welfare of livestock, including for animals being raised in high volume, concentrated production systems (e.g. factory farms). Philosophers should aid producers and scientists in specifying conditions for improved welfare in these systems. An adequately non-ideal approach to this problem should recognize both the economic rationale for these systems as well as the way that they constrain opportunities for improving animal welfare. Recent philosophical work on animal ethics has been dominated by authors who not only neglect this imperative, but also defeat it by drawing on oversimplified and rhetorically overstated descriptions of the conditions in which factory farmed animals actually live. This feature of philosophical animal ethics reflects a form of structural narcissism in which adopting a morally correct attitude defeats actions that could actually improve the welfare of livestock in factory farms to a considerable degree.

Ideals and Intensification: Welfare Campaigns in a Nation of Animal Lovers

This chapter studies the post-war evolution of British animal campaigning. It shows how the 1950s and 1960s saw long-standing concerns about cruelty to animals and wartime tropes of Britain as a Nation of Animal Lovers merge with concerns about the impacts of new intensive animal husbandry systems. So-called factory farms were not ubiquitous. However, in popular discourse, the “factory farm” increasingly functioned as a dystopian sociotechnical imaginary of new and alien technological threats to the English countryside, animal welfare, “British values,” consumer health, and the environment.

Animal Welfare and Pig Factory Farming in Ontario, Canada (1950s – Present)

This article explores the inception and development of pig factory farming in Ontario, Canada, since the 1950s to date, focusing on animal welfare dimensions. The study showed that although the term “animal welfare” was not well-known until the 1980s, discussions on cruelty and abnormal animal behaviour begun in the early days of factory farms. The article also delves into tensions between the humane movement and the agribusiness sector in Ontario. The article further sheds light on the social context that eventually led to an alliance in support of a conservative, incomplete notion of animal welfare between these former opponents. The article posits that as opposed to supporting the abolition of factory farming, the concept of animal welfare became central to implementing limited reforms in factory farming to convince the public and to marginalize discordant voices while concurrently expanding pig and other animal production worldwide.

Cloned Lives

Chapter 4 reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) as a thought experiment about the ethics of humane farming. In this novel cloned human beings are raised as sources of organs for noncloned human beings; they are killed in the donation process early in their adulthood. The government homes where most of the cloned human beings live in “deplorable conditions” suggest factory farms, while the boarding school at which our protagonists live evokes a humane, organic farm. These parallels raise issues of animal ethics. Is it enough to have, as influential food writer Michal Pollan believes, a good life and a respectful death even if that life is dramatically shortened? This chapter demonstrates the cognitive dissonance and logical incoherence inherent in the fictional scenario and illuminates the ethical contradictions of the humane meat movement.

The Green New Deal: What Makes It Necessary, What It Is, and How We Can Get It

This article serves as the content for a slide show presented at the Global Studies Association conference held at Loyola University in Chicago on June 6-8, 2019. The discussion emphasized the importance of establishing The Green New Deal by transitioning away from burning carbon and uranium to stop and reduce CO2 levels, building a Smart Grid, redesigning and rebuilding industries for zero waste, transitioning from agribusiness factory farms to organic, sustainable family-sized farms, redesigning new housing and retrofitting existing stock, increasing innovation and high design for all products and services, and curbing the production of poisons and removing pollutants from human consumption. The link to the presentation is http://ouleft.org/wp-content/uploads/Green-New-Deal-2.pdf.

The Impotence of the Causal Impotence Objection

Many significant harms, such as the mass suffering of animals on factory farms, can only be prevented, or at least lessened, by the collective action of thousands, or in some cases millions, of individual agents. In the face of this, it can seem as if individuals are powerless to make a difference, and thus that they lack reasons, at least from the consequentialist perspective, to refrain from eating meat. This has become known as the “causal impotence” problem. The standard response is to appeal to expected utility calculations. Recently, this response has been attacked, mostly on the grounds that the relevant causal mechanisms are more complex than its proponents are said to assume. In this paper, I argue that the attacks are unsuccessful, both at undermining specific expected utility calculations urged by me and Kagan, or even at showing that significantly different expected utility calculations wouldn’t justify the relevant behavior.