TikToker Fired After Exposing How Plastic Is Getting In Pig Feed

A TikToker in North Carolina has been given the boot after exposing a corporate pig farm in North Carolina.

Emmanuel Moore, a maintenance technician at Smithfield Foods which is a Chinese-owned entity that’s the largest pork producer in the United States, took a video of pig feed being mixed with plastic.

In response to Moore’s video and claims, he was fired immediately

A representative for Smithfield Foods stated, “their production process adequately removes this plastic from the final feed.”

However, Moore says he was in charge of the vacuums that were supposed to take the plastic off the feed and he stated that the plastic was never taken off the final feed due to the vacumns inaccuracies.

Don’t eat pork. https://t.co/C4vhLtbPTR

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) September 7, 2022

The Fayetteville Observer had more details to add:

Pork is big business in North Carolina. The industry generates nearly $6 billion in annual sales and supports more than 19,000 jobs statewide. North Carolina sits behind only Iowa and Minnesota as the nation’s largest pork producer.

But last year, a peek into how the sausage literally gets made here shocked many.

The jolt was delivered by a North Carolina man named Emmanuel Moore who, until his firing, worked as a maintenance technician at a grain elevator in Wilson, located about an hour east of Raleigh. The facility manufactures pig feed and is run by Smithfield Foods, a Chinese-owned entity that’s the largest pork producer in the United States.

Smithfield Foods representatives said they wouldn’t comment on personnel decisions, but that the company, which is headquartered in Virginia and owned by the Chinese corporation WH Group, does manufacture some of its feed from unused bread and baked good products (think hot dog buns and loaves of bread) that often arrive wrapped in plastic.

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However, Smithfield officials insist their production process adequately removes this plastic from the final feed.

Produce single use plastic ->turn it into animal feed ->feed it to pigs -> eat the pig. Circular economy right here 👏🏼 #locallygrow #sustainable #natural #organic #micronutrients https://t.co/rOWfYKs7vc

— Magi Richani (@MagiRichani) September 5, 2022

yall have so much faith in the FDA and it’s legal for farmers to feed pigs actual plastic in multiple states. like nothing is safe.

— bilquis. (@phllyjwn) September 6, 2022

Salon got the scoop too:

Kash Moore, who in June began posting stomach-churning TikTok videos. Moore, who identifies himself as a farm worker, shows the process by which pig feed is manufactured. The videos show old grocery store food, including breads and packaged food, being ground up and mixed in with the feed — with the plastic wrappings still intact as the processed food is ground up. Moore insinuates that plastic and paper products are being fed directly to farm pigs. The most damning video seems to show workers leaving plastic wrapping on bread before sending it off to be consumed. The creator eventually claimed to have been fired for uploading the videos, though Salon could not confirm the authenticity of the claims. (Salon reached out to Moore through his GoFundMe page, and has not heard back at the time of this writing.)

“Plastic ends up in our food more often than many would suspect, in fact I’d say that almost everything that one eats has traces of plastics,” Jane Muncke of the Food Packaging Forum, a nonprofit foundation that studies chemicals in all food packaging materials and their impacts on health, told Salon by email. “This is either tiny bits of microplastics or plastic chemicals. Both can originate from plastic food packaging, or food processing equipment or, sadly, from environmental pollution. Plastics are everywhere and they are persistent. And so they get into food and we ingest them.”