They are grinding up plastic and trash and feeding it to pigs and other livestock. A whistleblower, Emmanuel Moore, got fired from his job for his Tik-Tok viral videos exposing the the disgusting practice known as "garbage feeding."

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.

As a maintenance technician, or millwright, Moore said he was privy to each step of the production process. At 29, he said he was earning $27-an-hour and that he mostly enjoyed his job.

But one thing at the facility bothered him: Moore alleged the final feed contained plastic.

“They're feeding America, and like morally, I didn't feel right not saying something,” he said.

With an iPhone, Moore took videos of the production process and posted them to TikTok where they quickly went viral.
Going viral on TikTok

The first TikTok, posted on June 24, showed heaps of still-wrapped bread products rising up a conveyor belt. Another, viewed 4.1 million times, purported to show chunks of plastic in the feed Moore cupped in his hand. His most-watched TikTok, with 23.5 million views and countless reposts, features another shot of plastic tangled in the machinery.

The caption over this video read: “They fired me today for spreading the truth should I post everything.”

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.

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

“What you don't see in that video are vacuums that remove the packaging, the plastic,” said Jim Monroe, a vice president of corporate affairs at Smithfield Foods. “We've got specialized equipment that does that. It removes the plastics and other packaging from the baked goods.”

Monroe summarized the TikToks as "misleading."

Asked if the vacuums catch all the plastic materials, Emmanuel Moore responded via Facebook messenger: “No lol the vacs do not get all the trash and particles out. They are lying. I fixed them daily and unclogged the lines daily.”

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