The Sordid Reality of Pigs

In a talk titled “Romancing the Pig,” professor Kim Q. Hall of Appalachia State University offered an overview and critique of the cultural space occupied by pigs in America.

Drawing on a wide array of sources including George Orwell’s Animal Farm, E. B. White’s children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, food writer Michael Pollan, science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, and French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and using them as both cultural artifacts and intellectual guides, Hall touched on the fetishizing of barbecue in the American South, hog waste lagoons in North Carolina, and the possibility of transplanting organs from pigs to humans. She called for a fuller reckoning of the moral difficulties posed by these issues in response to the ways in which the pig has been “romanced.”

Hall’s talk was guided by what she termed a “queer crip” methodology. This approach looks beyond conventional narratives and debates surrounding issues related to pigs to investigate the ways in which they promote colonial whiteness and ableist nationalism. According to Hall, the practice of “queering” involved the continual questioning of boundaries.

She began her critique by examining the question of vegetarianism, which is often posed as a personal, moral decision. In this case, “the solution is to eat the right things and avoid eating the wrong things,” she said.

Hall problematized this view, seeing it as too narrow because it avoided confrontation with the whole reality of the meat industry. “The question of the relation between eating and violence is not solved by choosing not to eat certain foods,” she said.

Turning to barbecue culture, Hall scrutinized its prestigious position in Southern culture, where there are barbecue competitions, where people are proud of their regional sauce, and where in 2013, a Campaign for Real Barbecue was created in North Carolina to certify businesses that served so-called authentic barbecue in a search for “pure” American BBQ. Hall identified this as a form of colonial whiteness that erased its multicultural, working-class roots. Barbecue originated from Taino methods of cooking meat, which were then imitated by the Spanish.

It also ignores the way in which the pork industry has become corporatized. Pork may be connected with Americana in the popular imagination, but Hall pointed out that in North Carolina, a state with 8.9 million pigs and 9.1 people, a quarter of the pigs are owned by Chinese companies.

Meanwhile, due to marketing efforts of pork companies, the consumption of pork has become trendy. Some even call it health food. “Pork has indeed become the other white meat,” Hall said.

Erasure also looms large in the case of fecal lagoons in North Carolina. Hog waste permeates the air in many poor Black neighborhoods in North Carolina. Following recent lawsuits filed by affected residents against pork producers, the Republican controlled legislature recently passed legislation limiting the amount of money that can be rewarded in these lawsuits. Hall noted that the North Carolina Port Authority called this move “setting the record straight.”

This issue of hog waste, inherent to the raising of pigs on a massive, corporate scale, led Hall to an examination of current speculation on xenotransplantation, the harvesting of pigs for organ transplants. Xenotransplantation is often posed as a solution to the long waiting lists for organs in the United States, and the popular hope is that scientific experimentation will lead to its realization. Again, Hall called for a fuller reckoning of what that would mean. “The narrative of the heroic scientist, like every good story, has a foil. Where would those labs be, where the pigs are brought up until they are of age to donate their organs?” she asked.

Following the talk, an audience member asked Hall whether she believed eating meat was immoral. “These questions don’t address the complexities in which we are situated,” Hall said.