Please Happy

Paintings on the Pork Packing Plant

March 07th, 2010 | Category: L.A., Photography, Profile, Rrrradio!, The Brand

Two things:

1. I am a vegetarian.
2. My favorite food used to be bacon.

I can understand the love for bacon, the familial gatherings around burgers, the comfort of pork chops at Granny’s house.

But.

Well, for one, industrial farming is not good for you (stuff they inject into the animals, meat mixed together from different farms, meat cleaned with ammonia), not good for workers (bad conditions, poisonous substances) and obviously not good for the cooped up, injected animals.

But, that’s not the point of this story. The point is the cute and creepy art painted on the outside of a pork packing plant in Vernon (near South Central L.A.).

I made an audio story about it last semester – one of my first radio pieces ever  – that was recently posted on Southern California NPR station KPCC.

Photos by me and Jake de Grazia.

Profile of the Farmer John pork packing plant in Vernon, Calif. from 89.3 KPCC on Vimeo.

Comments
  • Elizabeth
    Lauren, this cracked me up. We drove by this plant several times a week when I was a kid on our way to church in Huntington Park. I just drove by a few weeks ago while taking someone on a tour of East LA. As kids we always thought it was funny that the pigs looked so happy on the walls but we knew what was going on inside when we saw the trucks driving in the big gates. - E
  • Piney
    I just watched the documentary, "Food, Inc." Have you? It is a must-see.
  • Yes! Food, Inc. is awesome on so many levels. I think it's the first food film that showed the lives of the trucked-in migrant workers. Yet another nauseating aspect of the industrial meat industry. I loved the farmer with the big glasses, though, eh? xo.
  • BeaElliott
    Yes... these are very eerie images. What an odd sense of humor. But to counterbalance one with the other:
    http://suicidefood.blogspot.com/
  • BeaElliott: Thanks for writing, and thanks (?) for the link. I have a friend who studies animal imagery in the meat imagery. That's something I never really thought about in my bacon-eating days. I guess both the Farmer John mural and the suicidefood blog make you think. And as long as we're thinking, that's a good first step. I think. Thanks!
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