Capitalist Pigs
Pigs, Pork, and Power in America
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
Pigs are everywhere in United States history. They cleared frontiers and built cities (notably Cincinnati, once known as Porkopolis), served as an early form of welfare, and were at the center of two nineteenth-century “pig wars.” American pork fed the hemisphere; lard literally greased the wheels of capitalism.
J. L. Anderson has written an ambitious history of pigs and pig products from the Columbian exchange to the present, emphasizing critical stories of production, consumption, and waste in American history. He examines different cultural assumptions about pigs to provide a window into the nation’s regional, racial, and class fault lines, and maps where pigs are (and are not) to reveal a deep history of the American landscape. A contribution to American history, food studies, agricultural history, and animal studies, Capitalist Pigs is an accessible, deeply researched, and often surprising portrait of one of the planet’s most consequential interspecies relationships.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anderson, a history professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, looks at the prevalence of pork and pork-related products in the U.S. in this comprehensive, sometimes stomach-churning volume. Before tracing the pork industry's growth into "a modern, high-tech, multi-billion-dollar industry" that handles about 110 million animals annually, he examines pigs' importance as a food staple throughout early U.S. history, for instance during the Civil War, when "food stability was as important to the Confederacy as gunpowder and lead." During the early 19th century, he observes, large-scale pork processing thrived in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio, so much that Cincinnati was nicknamed "Porkopolis." Anderson shines light on current exports, too, discussing how a $4.7 billion purchase by Chinese conglomerate Shuanghui International of Smithfield Foods, a major American pork producer, in 2013, indicated shifting power dynamics in favor of Asia. Throughout, Anderson's investigation is thorough, focusing on economic and social impacts, and, when appropriate, unflinching, such as while reporting that people working on hog farms breathe in a dust composed of "swine skin cells, feces, feed, bacteria, and fungi." The resulting book might be difficult for some to digest, but perhaps such is the nature of the beast. More than 50 illus.
