Porkopolis

Imagine a city under siege, where men and women are held hostage to their jobs and their lifestyles in order to ensure the safety of the chubby little quadrupeds who bring in the bacon and sausage on your breakfast tables.

Yes, men and women held hostage for the safety of pigs. 
This is not a dystopian vision of the future.

This is today.

Welcome to “Porkopolis” – a hundred square mile region in the American midwest - where even as pigs are being “farmed” up to their last claw, the people farming them are not spared too.

Modern day hog-farming is a clear extension of Henry Ford’s vision that transformed the auto-industry from “craft-production to mass production” nearly a century ago. And yet, this newer version of efficient “farming” reeks of Orwellian dystopia. While Fordism in the auto industry improved the conditions of its workers and benefited the society at large; modern day “Porkopolis” has left its workers and its “products” struggling to hold onto life itself while trapped in the complex web of productivity, profit margins and biosecurity.

Porkopolis takes pig farming seriously. It is a corporation that has (almost) successfully standardized the manufacture of life itself and has then established an assembly line for dismembering the same.

Here, hundreds of sows - genetically optimized for litter size, health, meat texture, etc - are housed in farrowing crates or sow stalls (a narrow metal cage, on a slatted floor allowing them a few inches more than what is absolutely needed). The healthy sows move through the factory floor assembly line and are artificially inseminated from a genetically superior father.  From this point on, the pregnant sows spend roughly the next three months of their life serving as incubators of industrial profit. They wait helplessly on a dark factory floor, automatically fed by a computer that calculates the daily caloric requirement and dispenses feed accordingly. 
                                     
                                   

The agony of gestation comes to an end in a few months but that is not the end of their ordeal yet. The sows find it difficult to move in their stalls, to even turn, but they try and protect the piglets from being crushed. But this sacrifice doesn’t really protect the young ones from pain much longer because soon their tails will be docked and they will be castrated – all without the luxury of an anesthesia or analgesia. The tails are docked because piglets under such restraints become more aggressive and end up fighting with wounds on their tails and ears. The scent of blood from these small fights further rouses their cannibalistic instincts and the pigs, if left undocked under such conditions, would eat their way into company profits. Male pigs are also castrated to avoid breeding, to reduce aggression and most importantly to get rid of the boar taint – a powerful flavor of the male pig meat that many don’t like. 

These sows can’t forage, root around or prepare a nest for their young. They suffer from extreme cardiovascular problems, digestive and urinary illnesses, bone and muscle weaknesses leaving them unable to stand on their own four feet. They are fed blood of their own lot and they are grown to maturity for the greatest yield. Finally, as the pigs reach maturity, they are prepared for the fulfillment of their life’s purpose i.e. to fill the coffers of the Porkopolis management. Each animal is dismembered and the pieces are auctioned for the best returns. Bones, hair, blood, claws, meat, viscera, excrement – nothing is spared as thousands of animals disappear without a trace in a matter of hours.

Porkopolis is spread over 100 square miles and works its way through 20,000 animals in a day. It is a systematic, vertically integrated system that is designed for greater profit margins and better returns. Porkopolis is all about advanced industrial pig farming and there is nothing natural about it.

It is all about science and numbers. The science of disease resistance, sperm selection, antibiotics, piglets per sow, grams per day, muscle/fat ratios, resource utilization and most importantly, the final profit margins.  

Porkopolis is a giant whole, spread over towns and villages spread over a hundred miles of the American Midwest. The lives of its workers and the porcine members of this closed society are both regulated by the company balance sheets and profit margins. The porcine members of this closed society end up as ingredients for well over 200 products of everyday use such as ink, beer, ice-creams, cigarettes, sand paper, bread, soaps, shampoos, conditioners, heart valves and even bullets. So much so, that the meat valued by you is only an incidental output of the Porkopolis, which is a system developed for profit where every variable is optimized for maximum yield and every resource is utilized to the best possible extent.

But even as Porkopolis minutely controls the lives of its four legged inmates, it doesn’t spare the lives of its human inhabitants either.

Men and women in the city of Porkopolis provide a snapshot of the developing world – with immigrants toiling their way through the monotony and drudgery of 10-hour days - hoping for a better future.

However, grueling ten hour shifts are probably the easiest part of working in Porkopolis. Their lives, their families, their expenses, their health and movements are closely monitored by the management to avoid any threat to the health of this money-making, meat raising enterprise. Their lives are in a state of perennial quarantine arising out of concerns of biosecurity  - concerns for the health of the pigs. Employees are made to shower, change and donne freshly disinfected boiler suites before they enter a facility. But control doesn’t end on the factory floor. It extends to their homes and their bedrooms as members of a family are forced to work at the same facility or are ordered to live separately. Porkopolis is driven by fear that individuals from different facilities could bring different pathogens to their facility and could cause an epidemic that could just as well destroy everything.

This fear is not entirely unjustified since the animals at Porkopolis cannot survive a day in the wild due to their poor constitution and subsistence on an antibiotic enriched diet. They have never encountered many a pathogens and they lack the sturdiness of the wild hog. And so, despite all these manic precautions, infections are never too far away. And so, every ten years, Prokopolis cleans its stocks and begins afresh. It orders a new strain of genetically optimized pigs from a quarantined facility and restarts its production line. This quarantine facility is maintained remotely and under the most stringent conditions possible such that its workers are forced to live inside the facility for the sake of safety of its gene pool. 

The strong, muscular hog of yore, with a snout capable of sniffing out buried truffles and dead meat no longer exists. An animal which was sturdy and lively, capable of speeds of up to 40 mph can barely walk a few steps without toppling over under its own weight. 

Porkopolis defends them viciously – not for some benevolent reason – for the sake of its profit margins. The peripheries of the processing units are under constant surveillance to eradicate any feral pigs that could bring home some dreaded pathogen. The hundreds of trucks move these thousands of animals over the 100 sq mile area by accounting for every last variable including the directions of the wind to minimize the flow of disease causing pathogens.

That is the extent of care that is exercised to protect your bacon!

But also caught in this fear are men and women of the town who may not even work at Porkopolis. They are inundated with smells of blood, viscera and excrement that are constantly produced by the company – leaving them no real option but to pack up and leave. The town thus becomes a monopoly of Porkopolis management. Despite the relentless control of their lives in the hands of the corporation, the workers of Porkopolis are only glad that they have a job. They live, eat and breathe to protect that job.  To protect their only shot at life – or atleast a semblance of it. A life that involves the repetitive hacking of a limb, slicing of the fat or docking the tail of a struggling pig for ten straight hours a day. Every day. Day after day. But atleast they have food on their table and a roof above their head.

The pigs no longer complain. They are cloaked in a veil of darkness that is only penetrated by the occasional shrieks of pain. They would probably run if they could, but today, they can’t even stand on their own feet.  They drink blood of their fellow beings but there is very little blood flowing through their own bodies as they stand caged in metal barricades.

All in all, every quadruped member of the Porkopolis was bred and maintained for maximal profit margins and the meat that you so cherish is only an incidental by-product.

Christien Meindertsma, a Dutch artist and designer traced the life of a single pig called 5049 and found it all over the super market shelves. At the end of its life, 5049 was reduced to 3 kgs of skin, 15.2 kgs of bones, 54 kgs of meat, 14.2 kgs of internal organs, 5.5 kgs of blood, 5.4 kgs of Fat, and 6.5 kgs of miscellaneous. Every part of 5049 was measured, quality controlled, bid for and transformed so that you would no longer even suspect.

                                           

A single pig metamorphosed into soap, shampoo, conditioner, body lotion, tooth paste (fatty acids from pork bone fat), dough (hair protein), low fat butter (gelatin for texture), cellular concrete (light concrete, proteins from bones), train brakes (bone ash), desserts (gelatin), fine bone china (bone for translucency and shape), paint (texture, gloss), sand paper (glue btw sand and paper), meat cuts (meat cuts, were glued with pig blood fibrin), beer (getting rid of clouding elements by filtering through gelatin), cigarettes (hemoglobin from pigs in filter; artificial lung in the filter), anti-wrinkle creams (collagen), bullets, heart valves and renewable energy (everything that can’t be used for anything else).

This fully optimized, vertically integrated system ensures that you get your bacon a few cents cheaper. Estimates say that farming wild pigs on straw would cost the companies more and this would in turn raise your bacon bills by up to 25%. Porkopolis further tries to offset your costs by optimizing the pig fat (by feeding them glycerine) and making it more suitable for biofuel production. After all, good, industrial grade pig fat is an important source of revenue. Porkopolis does everything it can to fulfill your American dream – for saving those hard earned dollars.

The question that remains is – Is it worth it? 

Porkopolis is a symbol of productivity and industrialization. Propelled by scientific advancement and vertical integration, its unceasing wheels are drivers of intensive resource management and maximal profit margins.  The fact that a few human lives are also getting stuck in the grind is only a minor detail – collateral damage, not worth mentioning. 

This is not a dystopian vision of the future.

This is today.

Welcome to “Porkopolis.”

References and sources: 

1) http://www.christienmeindertsma.com/index.php?/books/pig-05049/
2) http://www.pigbusiness.co.uk/issues/20-facts/
3)http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2005406/DOMINIC-WEST-Giant-factory-pig-farms-arent-just-morally-wrong-Theyre-making-ill.html
4) http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jan/06/animal-welfare-food-bacon
5) http://www.farmforward.com/features/pigmanship
6) A talk given by Mr. Alex Blanchette at the Center for Advanced scientific research in Santa Fe. Mr. Blanchette is a graduate student whose doctoral dissertation aims to study the cultural and sociological impact of intensive hog farming.