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In chapter five of Nature’s Metropolis, Cronon discusses the importance and growth of Chicago’s meatpacking industry in the 19th century. He discusses how, helped by the surrounding railroads, the Chicago stockyards grew over time into a large, vital part of the nation’s meat industry. The meat packing industry is one that has gotten a lot of attention historically. Cronon makes note of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book The Jungle, which famously prompted reform of the meatpacking industry by outlining the factories’ horrible, unsanitary conditions. (208) Of course, problems still persist today. A simple Google search would reveal countless videos of the inhumane and unclean conditions in many factory farms today—things like hundreds of pigs crammed into tiny, filthy enclosures. While these accounts are quite disturbing, they also point to something Ian discussed in his post—namely, the way commodification of natural things completely changes the way we look at and interact with those things. Ian refers to water as the thing commodified in his post, and I agree and actually believe that the commodification with animals hammers the point home in an even more dramatic way, as in this case the things being commodified are living animals, who are of course hurt in the process.
In class, we have often discussed how natural resources can be taken advantage of in a way that still seems “natural” to us. One big point of difference between natural and unnatural use of these resources has been the idea of whether the person using them is doing so on a small scale to support their self, rather than on a large scale to sell the end product to a mass market. So, in this case, consider the idea of a farmer who raises some cows and pigs to feed himself as opposed to something like a stockyard or a factory where a corporation is raising the animals to slaughter and sell. Most of us probably consider the activity of the lone farmer to be a more “natural” way of using the animals. Much as animals eat one another in nature, this man is simply using what animals he needs to feed himself in a way that somewhat mimics the natural food chain. I don’t have proof to back this up, but one would assume those animals are kept in better, less abusive conditions than animals being raised to sell to a large market. Again, as Ian discussed, when water was commodified, companies used it as a place to dump waste, which of course hurts the water’s quality. This is analogous to the case of the comparison between the small vs. large farm. In the big farm or stockyard, there is bound to be lower standards of quality and a more mistreatment of the animals. I found Cronon’s chapter on meat to be an interesting example of how, once something natural has been commodified and turned into a product, it is treated more carelessly and most likely suffers in quality (especially interesting because any company would claim to strive to get its customers the highest possible quality of product).