Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave its blessing to something that sounds like it was lifted from a dystopian novel: genetically modified pigs, designed with CRISPR technology to resist a devastating viral disease, are one step closer to your dinner plate. Developed by UK-based PIC, the gene-edited pigs are engineered to resist porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), a virus that has ravaged swine industries worldwide.
On the surface, it sounds like a win. Healthier pigs. Fewer losses. Safer meat. But scratch beneath that sterile narrative and you’ll find something far darker—a techno-fix scrambling to mask a system that should never have existed in the first place.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t innovation. This is a desperate patch on an unspeakably violent, anti-ecological industrial meat system—one that produces not food, but fatigue; not nourishment, but necrosis.
What Problem Are We Actually Solving?
PRRS is a brutal disease. But why does it spread so easily and cause such devastation? Because pigs today are raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—tight, filthy, and cruel spaces where animals are treated as units of production rather than living beings embedded in ecological webs.
CRISPR is not curing a natural condition. It’s enabling an unnatural system. It’s a bandaid on a gaping wound that industrial agriculture refuses to heal. Instead of rethinking the underlying design—crowded conditions, monoculture breeding, and total disregard for ecological balance—we are editing pig DNA to better survive the abuse.
This is not progress. It’s pathology.
The Logic of Control
Gene-editing, especially in the way it’s being wielded here, is part of a deeper sickness. A kind of metabolic arrogance that says: “We can fix any mess we make, as long as we engineer harder.” It’s the same logic that tells us to geoengineer the climate rather than cut emissions, to develop drought-resistant crops instead of changing our water-sucking habits, to “fix” nature instead of repairing our relationship with it.
Modernity’s house is built on the delusion of separability: that humans stand apart from, above, and in control of the rest of life. Gene-editing CAFO pigs is a textbook example of this logic. It ignores the planetary metabolism we are embedded in—the relational field that connects soil, pigs, viruses, humans, and histories.
The Biotech of Denial
While PIC claims this technology is about “animal health,” it is fundamentally about preserving profit margins. PRRS costs the pork industry hundreds of millions a year. What we’re seeing is not a solution, but an adaptation—modernity’s compulsive need to keep the system running, no matter how much it destroys.
Instead of confronting the emotional, relational, and ecological bankruptcies of CAFOs, we are tweaking the genome. This is what Outgrowing Modernity would call the “education of denial”—learning to stay functional in a broken system instead of metabolizing its collapse.
GMOs and Inflammation—A Slippery Slope
The long-term impacts of genetically modified foods on human health are still debated, but some correlations are already alarming: higher rates of inflammation, gut disorders, and immune dysfunction have all been observed in populations with high GMO intake. While this particular gene-edit doesn’t involve foreign DNA, the broader pattern remains: industrial genetic tinkering is rarely accompanied by deep relational responsibility or long-term ecological accountability.
Editing life for short-term gain, without considering the slow rhythms of Earth’s intelligence, is a recipe for breakdown—of ecosystems, immune systems, and trust.
A Call for Ethical Imagination, Not Genetic Optimization
Let’s imagine another path. What if, instead of editing pigs to survive unbearable lives, we reimagined how we relate to animals altogether? What if we composted the factory-farm system—not with synthetic genes but with relational repair? What if GMOs were used to restore degraded ecosystems, revive extinct pollinators, or undo toxic legacies—rather than prop up industrial meat?
This, too, is a question of educational responsibility. What rhythms are we attuned to? Are we serving life’s entanglements, or extracting from them until collapse? Are we willing to stretch into discomfort, to ask: What are we eating, really? And who pays the price?
Not Fit for a Future We Deserve
PIC and its parent company, Genus, say these pigs won’t hit the U.S. market until at least 2026. That gives us time. Time to pause. Time to ask what kind of future we’re feeding. If gene-edited pork is the solution, then we’ve clearly lost the plot. Because the real disease isn’t PRRS—it’s our refusal to face the systems of suffering we’ve normalized.
This isn’t just about pigs. It’s about who we’re becoming.
Image from https://responsibletechnology.org/tamethetech/