As meatpacking facilities became COVID-19 hotspots, the pandemic renewed the importance of longstanding claims from environmental justice and agrifood scholars. The former asserts the perceived dispensability of marginalized populations sustains environmental injustices, whereas the latter stresses that decades of industrial consolidation created structural instability in the food supply chain. This article asks how industry and government leverage existing socio-ecological inequalities to ensure the continuity of the meatpacking supply chain during COVID-19, and the implications these actions hold for workers. To answer these questions, the authors perform case studies of meatpacking facilities in three Midwestern states. This article uses the critical environmental justice framework to expand research on sacrifice zones to include hazardous worksites such as meatpacking. We find that toxic employment flourishes through firms labor practices that pass socio-ecological risks onto workers in the name of efficiency, and through a complicit state that prioritizes accumulation and consumption over workers health.

随着肉类包装设施成为COVID-19的热点，这种流行病再次凸显了环境正义和农业食品学者长期以来提出的主张的重要性。前者断言被边缘化的人口的可分配性维持了环境的不公正，而后者则强调数十年的工业整合造成了食品供应链中的结构不稳定。本文询问工业界和政府如何利用现有的社会生态不平等现象来确保COVID-19期间肉类包装供应链的连续性，以及这些行动对工人的影响。为了回答这些问题，作者对中西部三个州的肉类包装设施进行了案例研究。本文使用关键的环境正义框架来扩展对牺牲区的研究，以包括诸如肉类包装等危险工地。我们发现，有毒的就业机会通过公司的劳动实践得以兴旺发​​展，这些劳动实践以效率的名义将社会生态风险转移给了工人，并通过了一个将积累和消费置于工人健康之上的复杂状态。