The cruel manner in which the animals are being burned is what traumatizes Jimmy the most. However this indifference to life is something that Jimmy will be forced to grow up with. The set up of Jimmy's society is drastically different to the society of today. In Jimmy's world big corporations and their workers live in compounds that serve as cities and the cities itself serve as uncivilized wastelands called the pleeblands. This distinction draws the thick line between the rich and powerful and the average working class. Jimmy lives during a time where there is medication or a vaccine for anything and everything. People also survive off of food that is not even made from real ingredients, rather, from soy or some type of genetically modified product. Jimmy's father works for the OrganInc Farm, where human organs are cultivated in actual pigs called pigoons. The opportunity to make money off selling these organs is a huge accomplishment for OrganInc Farm. The practice itself is extremely unnatural and many fear the idea of the corporations, who are not under the control of any governing body, passing on these crosses between humans and pigs as pork due to the lack of meat. "Still as time went on and the coastal aquifers turned salty and the vast tundra bubbled with methane and the drought in the mid-continental plains region went on and on and the Asian steppes turned to sand dunes and meat became harder and harder to come by, some people had their doubts"(24). This environmental upset that Jimmy describes is caused by society's lack of regard for nature and directly relates to why meat is no longer available. Protecting the Earth is no longer a factor in the world of big business. .
Jimmy's mother and father effectively exemplify the two sides of their society. While Jimmy's father is a corporation enthusiast, Jimmy's mother is strongly against everything that the corporations do.
