Review: <i>Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, & the Factory Farm</i>, by Alex Blanchette
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, & the Factory Farm, by Alex Blanchette Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, & the Factory Farm, Alex Blanchette, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2020 320 pp. Illustrations. $104.95 (hardcover); $27.95 (paper); (eBook) Josée Johnston Josée Johnston University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2022) 22 (2): 100–102. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.2.100 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Guest Access Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Josée Johnston; Review: Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, & the Factory Farm, by Alex Blanchette. Gastronomica 1 May 2022; 22 (2): 100–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.2.100 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search What is the real story behind supermarket bacon and pork chops? How much do we know about the people who labor to bring meaty meals to our plates? Even if we swear off eating meat, are we still implicated in a system of factory farming? Building on a two-year ethnography of the industrial pig set in a rural American community, Alex Blanchette seeks to answer these questions in his book, Porkopolis. Porkopolis has its share of muckraking details. Blanchette carefully researched the pigs and people in a town he calls “Dixon,” centered on “Dover Foods”—an agribusiness firm that kills 5.6 million hogs annually. This translates into one pig killed every 3 seconds, 2.8 million pounds of meat shipped transnationally, and 5.5 million pounds of biological matter moving through the Dover system daily. Readers learn that breeding sows “never see daylight except through tiny windows on the barn’s periphery” (p. 95),... You do not currently have access to this content.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".