Sasha

The [Non] Human Body: Industrial Agriculture and Livestock Systems in Conversation

In reflecting on our readings this week, I couldn’t shake the idea that some of the case studies we read wove human bodies and human biology into the capitalist production systems explicitly at work on nonhumans. In the articles on the agricultural and livestock industries, it seemed to me that the elliptical curves which bring “nature” (i.e. plants and animals) into systems of economic commodification swing dangerously close to humans.
In “Killing for profit: global livestock industries and their socio-ecological implications,” Jody Emel and Harvey Neo open with an epigraph that directly relates the sum of meat produced and transported by the pig industry to human mass:

The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Forth Worth, Charlotte, El Passo, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson. (Emel and Neo)

In this statement, the mass of human populations is equated with the mass of pig populations – and I doubt I was alone in finding this comparison jarring. The rhetorical equation in which the human is mapped side by side with the nonhuman continues throughout the essay: Emel and Neo contrast the wellbeing of pigs and cows with that of the factory workers who manage their production. There is a peculiar analogy between the (human) workers and the (nonhuman) animals; often “sourced” from Mexico and from the poorest Midwestern towns, workers are “selected” for their lower-class status and their degree of financial desperation. The pigs, too, are sourced and selected – from hybrid combinations of genes that produce the fastest growth rates and the greatest final volumes of meat. In the liminal space of the industrial warehouse, both humans and pigs (or cows, or chickens…) are subjected to a volatile mix of hormones, nitrates and phosphates as well as pesticides and herbicides. The authors cite that the turnover of workers in such warehouses is often 100% in one year; the humans arrive and depart almost as quickly as their nonhuman counterparts.

In Julie Guthman’s article, “Excess consumption or over-production?: US farm policy, global warming, and the bizarre attribution of obesity” it is again the human body that enters into capitalist politics. Here, the author argues that the popular claim which pinpoints obesity as a driving force behind agricultural overproduction in the United States is highly flawed. Human eating habits cannot account for the massive increase in agricultural production throughout US farming history. Rather, it was the actions of the US government coupled with the interests of farmer’s unions and industrial agriculture which are to blame. But interestingly, Guthman severs the causal link between the human body and agricultural overproduction in the beginning of her essay, only to show in her argument how the human body is actually entangled with agricultural and industrial practices in even more pervasive and potentially insidious ways. Guthman narrates how industrial firms in the 20^th century sought to make food “cheaper than the real deal” by dealing in substitutes – cultivating genetically modified chickens (38 days to the pot!) and adding micro-ingredients to fruit drinks, sodas, Cheetos and diet foods. The very design of food made it difficult to “eat just one once that package is open”: ever more orgiastic tastes were catered to the human senses. Crucially, Guthman reports that many chemicals used in intensified agricultural and livestock industries are actually linked to endocrine illness – it is the waste of the food industry which might actually be to blame for making people in America fat. Finally, in parody of the arguments she opposes, Guthman suggests that we “mine bodies for excess body fat” to generate lipofuels in order to combat global warming. The author assures us she is joking – that this suggestion was purely ironic. But for me, this last rhetorical stab missed its target. If obesity (and obese human bodies) is not related to climate change in the way other researchers suggest, they are still implicated in what Guthman proves are even more complex assemblages of industrial capital, genetically modified non-humans and environmental conditions. Mining bodies for lipofuels doesn’t seem all that ridiculous when you seriously consider the possibility that runoff from industrial farms may be causing the massive trend in human obesity in the first place. The emphasis returns, once again, to the functioning of human bodies as entities mixed up with the functioning of non-human ones, and implicated in exactly the same rhetorical, political and environmental fields.

Works Cited:

Emel J and Neo H. 2011. Chapter 3 in Peet et al. Killing for Profit: Global Livestock Industries and their Socio-Ecological Implications

Guthman J. 2011. Chapter 2 in Peet et al. Excess Consumption or Over-production: US Farm Policy, Global Warming, and the Bizarre Attribution of Obesity