Slaughterhouse Blues

Slaughterhouse Blues
Author: Donald D. Stull
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2004
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

SLAUGHTERHOUSE BLUES: THE MEAT AND POULTRY INDUSTRY IN NORTH AMERICA draws on more than 15 years of research by the authors, a cultural anthropologist and a social geographer, to present a detailed look at the meat and poultry industry in the United States and Canada. Following chapters on today's beef, poultry, and pork industries, SLAUGHTERHOUSE BLUES examines industry impacts on workers and on the communities that host its plants. The book details the authors' efforts to help communities plan for and mitigate the negative consequences of meat and poultry plants as well as community opposition to confined animal feeding operations. The book concludes by exploring alternatives to North America's model of industrialized meat production.

Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse

Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse
Author: Paula Young Lee
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781584656982

This title offers an interdisciplinary look at the rise of the slaughterhouse in 19th-century Europe and the Americas. Over the course of this period, the factory slaughterhouse replaced the hand slaughter of animals by individual butchers. A wholly modern invention, the municipal slaughterhouse was a political response to public concerns.

Critical Food Issues

Critical Food Issues
Author: Laurel Phoenix
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2009-09-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0313354456

This authoritative, research-based collection examines urgent threats to future global food security and evaluates current and potential solutions. Critical Food Issues: Problems and State-of-the-Art Solutions Worldwide examines 31 crucial areas of concern, from soil degradation, depletion of water for irrigation, and loss of biodiversity to declining rural livelihoods, hunger and obesity, unjust farm labor practices, and farm animal mistreatment. Critical Food Issues divides its coverage into two exhaustive volumes, one on bioenvironmental topics and one with a sociocultural focus. Throughout, highly accomplished experts from a variety of academic backgrounds review the current state of research on specific problems, then identify strategies for confronting those problems that balance sustainable agrifood systems with environmental stewardship, healthy people, and equitable communities. At a time of increasing public outcries over the quality of food and the impact of agrifood production on long-term environmental and human well-being, Critical Food Issues offers an authoritative and comprehensive basis on which producers, consumers, and citizens can make more informed decisions about the future of food.

Body Gothic

Body Gothic
Author: Xavier Aldana Reyes
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2014-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1783160942

The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012).

The Monster at Our Door

The Monster at Our Door
Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2010-03-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1595588531

The MacArthur Fellow and author of Dead Cities presents a terrifying forecast of a new global threat—and “its argument is irrefutable” (The Independent). Hailed by The Nation as a “master of disaster prose,” author and activist Mike Davis addresses the imminent catastrophe of Avian influenza. In 1918, a pandemic strain of influenza killed at least forty million people in three months. Now, leading researchers believe, another global outbreak is all but inevitable. A virus of astonishing lethality, known as H5N1, has become entrenched in the poultry and wild bird populations of East Asia. It kills two out of every three people it infects. The World Health Organization warns that it is on the verge of mutating into a super-contagious pandemic form that could visit several billion homes within two years. In this urgent and alarming book, Mike Davis reconstructs the scientific and political history of a viral apocalypse in the making, exposing the central roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments, in creating the ecological conditions for the emergence of this new plague.

Scratching Out a Living

Scratching Out a Living
Author: Angela Stuesse
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2016-01-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520962397

How has Latino immigration transformed the South? In what ways is the presence of these newcomers complicating efforts to organize for workplace justice? Scratching Out a Living takes readers deep into Mississippi’s chicken processing plants and communities, where large numbers of Latin American migrants were recruited in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce in some of the most dangerous and lowest-paid jobs in the country. As America’s voracious appetite for chicken has grown, so has the industry’s reliance on immigrant workers, whose structural position makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Based on the author’s six years of collaboration with a local workers’ center, this book explores how Black, white, and new Latino Mississippians have lived and understood these transformations. Activist anthropologist Angela Stuesse argues that people’s racial identifications and relationships to the poultry industry prove vital to their interpretations of the changes they are experiencing. Illuminating connections between the area’s long history of racial inequality, the industry’s growth and drive to lower labor costs, immigrants’ contested place in contemporary social relations, and workers’ prospects for political mobilization, Scratching Out a Living paints a compelling ethnographic portrait of neoliberal globalization and calls for organizing strategies that bring diverse working communities together in mutual construction of a more just future.

Violence and Harm in the Animal Industrial Complex

Violence and Harm in the Animal Industrial Complex
Author: Gwen Hunnicutt
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2024-11-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1040254403

This book grapples with multispecies violent exploitations embedded in corridors of power within the animal-industrial complex (A-IC). The A-IC is a useful framework for understanding how exploitative human-animal relations are central to capitalist relations and profit accumulation. ‘A-IC-related-violence’ – killing animals for economic gain – has a ripple effect which results in profound consequences for humans as well. This collection of international scholarship explores topics as varied as how A-IC-related-violence is reproduced and sustained through rapidly changing discursive strategies, ideological architecture, and particular cultural forms that elide and legitimize animal cruelty. Several chapters expose collusion between governments, corporations, and academia as central to maintaining dominance of A-IC-related-violence. Other scholars explore the trouble with making the conditions of “meat” production visible – of de-fetishizing meat commodities. The scholarship critically explores dynamic components of an apparatus that enables A-IC-related-violence and harm but is situated within the capitalist order and charts A-IC-related-violence as the key profit-generating practice in select domains of the A-IC. The book unmasks inherent cruelties in a proliferation of social forms that ultimately reflect a socioeconomic system that centralizes capitalist life characterized by endless growth, competitiveness, and profligate consumption. This is essential reading for those engaged in critical criminology, green criminology, violence studies, peace and conflict studies, critical animal studies, or animal rights-oriented scholars.

Superfund laws and animal agriculture

Superfund laws and animal agriculture
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Energy and Commerce. Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials
Publisher:
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Fresh

Fresh
Author: Susanne Freidberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0674263626

That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey—not just over land and sea, but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh. Opening the door of an ordinary refrigerator, it tells the curious story of the quality stored inside: freshness. We want fresh foods to keep us healthy, and to connect us to nature and community. We also want them convenient, pretty, and cheap. Fresh traces our paradoxical hunger to its roots in the rise of mass consumption, when freshness seemed both proof of and an antidote to progress. Susanne Freidberg begins with refrigeration, a trend as controversial at the turn of the twentieth century as genetically modified crops are today. Consumers blamed cold storage for high prices and rotten eggs but, ultimately, aggressive marketing, advances in technology, and new ideas about health and hygiene overcame this distrust. Freidberg then takes six common foods from the refrigerator to discover what each has to say about our notions of freshness. Fruit, for instance, shows why beauty trumped taste at a surprisingly early date. In the case of fish, we see how the value of a living, quivering catch has ironically hastened the death of species. And of all supermarket staples, why has milk remained the most stubbornly local? Local livelihoods; global trade; the politics of taste, community, and environmental change: all enter into this lively, surprising, yet sobering tale about the nature and cost of our hunger for freshness.

A Companion to American Agricultural History

A Companion to American Agricultural History
Author: R. Douglas Hurt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2022-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1119632226

Provides a solid foundation for understanding American agricultural history and offers new directions for research A Companion to American Agricultural History addresses the key aspects of America’s complex agricultural past from 8,000 BCE to the first decades of the twenty-first century. Bringing together more than thirty original essays by both established and emerging scholars, this innovative volume presents a succinct and accessible overview of American agricultural history while delivering a state-of-the-art assessment of modern scholarship on a diversity of subjects, themes, and issues. The essays provide readers with starting points for their exploration of American agricultural history—whether in general or in regards to a specific topic—and highlights the many ways the agricultural history of America is of integral importance to the wider American experience. Individual essays trace the origin and development of agricultural politics and policies, examine changes in science, technology, and government regulations, offer analytical suggestions for new research areas, discuss matters of ethnicity and gender in American agriculture, and more. This Companion: Introduces readers to a uniquely wide range of topics within the study of American agricultural history Provides a narrative summary and a critical examination of field-defining works Introduces specific topics within American agricultural history such as agrarian reform, agribusiness, and agricultural power and production Discusses the impacts of American agriculture on different groups including Native Americans, African Americans, and European, Asian, and Latinx immigrants Views the agricultural history of America through new interdisciplinary lenses of race, class, and the environment Explores depictions of American agriculture in film, popular music, literature, and art A Companion to American Agricultural History is an essential resource for introductory students and general readers seeking a concise overview of the subject, and for graduate students and scholars wanting to learn about a particular aspect of American agricultural history.