Global industrial animal production reaches apogetic heights in the American Midwest, where vertically integrated pork manufacturers intertwine their workforce and their pigs in each other’s biology to a staggering degree. For his study Porkopolis, anthropologist Alex Blanchette embedded in an Iowa pork town that births, raises, and kills millions of animals every year. What he found was not a “project of human mastery over hogs” but rather an unfolding model of modern meat that “revolves around remaking the lives and labor of human beings to make them amenable to capitalist animality.” The meat and poultry industry is difficult to mechanize and automate because, no matter how hard corporations try, it’s impossible to standardize living things. Even the largest-scale firms depend on a lot of workers to make quick and precise judgment calls about something intrinsically variable, such as where to cut a subtly individual carcass or how to sexually stimulate a particular sow for artificial insemination. Instead of humanizing the industry, this dependence has incentivized firms to industrialize people. Blanchette writes of a firm that puts potential employees through tests at the company health clinic to determine where their bodies are strongest so as to match them with the part of the pig they are best suited to repetitively disassemble. When he asked workers how the disassembly line was transforming their physiologies, “some men enthusiastically lifted up their T-shirts to reveal subtly different patterns of muscular development etched across their backs, while others showed how one of their wrists, arms, or fingers differed from others in size or shape.”33 Slaughterhouse injuries have changed, from acute maimings to the more affordable chronic muscle and nerve damage. Capital intends to get the most out of its pigs and its people, no matter if what results is gruesome and obscene.