Trottier Brody
Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 2J4 Canada.
Agric Human Values. 2023 May 17:1-16. doi: 10.1007/s10460-023-10452-4.
The human labor and animal inputs required to manufacture meat products are kept physically and symbolically distanced from the consumer. Recently however, meatpacking plants received significant news media attention when they emerged as hotpots for COVID-19 - threatening workers' health, requiring plants to slow production, and forcing farmers to euthanize livestock. In light of these disruptions, this research asks: how did news media frame the impact of COVID-19 on the meat industry, and to what extent is a process of observed? Examining a sample of 230 news articles from coverage of US meatpacking plants and COVID-19 in 2020, I find that news media largely attributes the cause for the spread of COVID-19 in meatpacking plants to the history of exploitative working conditions and business practices of the meat industry. By contrast, the solutions offered to address these problems aim at alleviating the immediate obstacles posed by the pandemic and returning to, rather than challenging, the status quo. These short-run solutions for complex issues demonstrate the constraints in imagining alternatives to a problem rooted in capitalism. Furthermore, my analysis shows that animals are only made visible in the production process when their bodies become a waste product.
制造肉类产品所需的人力和动物投入在物理和象征意义上都与消费者保持着距离。然而，最近肉类加工厂成为了新冠疫情的热点，威胁着工人健康，导致工厂减产，并迫使农民对牲畜实施安乐死，从而受到了新闻媒体的广泛关注。鉴于这些干扰，本研究提出问题：新闻媒体如何构建新冠疫情对肉类行业的影响，以及在何种程度上观察到了一个过程？通过对2020年美国肉类加工厂和新冠疫情报道中的230篇新闻文章样本进行分析，我发现新闻媒体在很大程度上将新冠疫情在肉类加工厂传播的原因归因于肉类行业剥削性的工作条件和商业行为的历史。相比之下，为解决这些问题所提供的解决方案旨在缓解疫情带来的直接障碍，并回归而非挑战现状。这些针对复杂问题的短期解决方案显示了在构想资本主义根源问题的替代方案时所受到的限制。此外，我的分析表明，动物只有在其身体成为废品时才在生产过程中被看到。
