Factories, farms, & Other

Metaphors of Production

Originally developed to describe the industrialization of American agriculture, the term “factory farm” has become perhaps the defining metaphor of our age.  The metaphor today finds wide expression in discourses that have little to do with food production, from critiques of the white-collar workplace to allegories of consumerism and colonialism.  This expansive use of the metaphor corresponds to a changing nature of work and leisure in a globalized economy.  As labor is increasingly casualized, populations come to feel the concerns about management and surveillance that inhere in the factory metaphor more in their role as consumers than as producers.  This shift to a consumer society is similarly expressed in other forms of food writing from the 20^th Century, as Upton Sinclair’s focus on the industrial slaughterhouse is replaced with Eric Schlosser’s focus on the fast-food franchise, and as John Harvey Kellogg’s dietary asceticism succumbs to Robert Atkins’s remorseless indulgence.

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