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The World Is a Factory Farm - Public Books

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In late 2018, I traveled to Guangzhou, a city of more than 13 million people in southern China, as an emerging pathogen was sweeping across the country. African Swine Fever (ASF), a disease with a nearly 100 percent fatality rate in pigs, had set China on guard. The disease threatened a hallmark of contemporary urban Chinese life: the reliable availability of cheap pork. While ASF had been detected in countries like Russia and Belgium, 2018 was the first time it had appeared in China, the world’s top pork producer. The disease spread quickly throughout the country. Pigs were preemptively slaughtered. Factory farms and international borders stepped up biosecurity levels, a response that reflected a decades-long project of optimizing ecology in the pursuit of modernity. It’s a project I had become very familiar with as I researched how artificial intelligence had been used to scale up pork farming, creating China’s “pork miracle”: the ability to meet the domestic demand of 54 million ton

In late 2018, I traveled to Guangzhou, a city of more than 13 million people in southern China, as an emerging pathogen was sweeping across the country. African Swine Fever (ASF), a disease with a nearly 100 percent fatality rate in pigs, had set China on guard. The disease threatened a hallmark of contemporary urban Chinese life: the reliable availability of cheap pork. While ASF had been detected in countries like Russia and Belgium, 2018 was the first time it had appeared in China, the world’s top pork producer. The disease spread quickly throughout the country. Pigs were preemptively…

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