https://www.reddit.com/r/idiocracy/comments/1b32i8h/a_maintenance_technician_exposes_how_plastics/
How the hell do we avoid this outside of going Vegan?
Worse, how the heck is this legal?
I KNEW there was a reason for the prohibition on pork!
I doubt that’s legal in the EU and we also have plastics in our bodies.
Bad news. “Going vegan” will not protect you.
Don’t get your news from TikTok.
When it comes to overseeing animal feeds, North Carolina follows the regulations set by the Association of American Feed Control Officials, a voluntary group made up of local, state, and federal agencies. The AAFCO states that feed derived from recovered retail food, like the feed at Smithfield’s Wilson facility, “must not contain packing materials” including plastics.
“From a nutrition standpoint, the pig cannot capture any of the foreign contaminant into its blood stream because the particles are too big, and so it all gets excreted out,” said Nicholas Gabler, an animal physiologist at Iowa State University who specializes in swine nutrition and reproduction.
So, if that is true what they are doing is illegal, but it would not make any difference to final human consumers.
Microplastics are not really small plastics churned up by a shredder, they are microscopic.
Honestly garbage feeding seems shocking, but it is an incredible way to reduce food going into landfills.
If they’re feeding them literal plastic trash, I don’t believe 0.000% of any chemical contaminant doesn’t end up in the pig. The Feed Control groups are voluntary which means there are plenty of farms who will not participate (likely the worst offenders). Many states ban the practice, but many do not.
As for Nicholas Gabler, I don’t know if his research is funded or influenced by the trade. Seeing how 65% of his work is research, and his primary research goal amounts to lowering costs to raise pigs, I don’t know…
I work partially in the animal feed industry, and AAFCO requirements are not suggestions.
They are not feeding them plastic trash, they are feeding them discarded food, much like how a lot of homesteaders will throw out scraps for their pigs. They are alleging that the packaging is not being removed as required by AAFCO standards.
The regulations state that the plastic packaging has to be removed prior to feeding. It is quite possible the farm that guy was working on was in violation of the regulations, but that is another discussion about how woefully underfunded our government enforcement is.
Heather Overton of the N.C. Department of Agriculture said the state inspects feed facilities about every two-and-a-half years, using a “risk-based model that takes into account facility type and compliance history,” to determine how often inspections occur.
As for those plastics ending up in us when we eat the pork, it is not possible. Our bodies do not digest plastic and put those compounds in our cells. If those pigs have microplastics in them (they do) they are getting them the same way we are, through breathing them in or ingesting them through contaminated water and food.
As for Nicholas Gabler, he works for a publicly funded university, not the industry. If you are going to question the motives of college professors and researchers, I don’t know where you would get more unbiased science from.
Yeah, your most likely vector for microplastics in your body is good ol’ American (and European, and South American, and Asian, and Australian) tap water. And not just the water you drink, but the water you bathe in, brush your teeth with, wash your clothes in, run in the dishwasher to clean your utensils and plates.
And it has been that way for quite a few decades.
More of it is here
The thing is, I really hate “Nowthis” news and their similar competitors. They tend to oversimplify things and completely miss the point.
They make some weird argument about plastics that isn’t really scientifically accurate to what we know about how microplastics are generated and get into our bodies. Those pigs are being fed microplastics alright, because they are eating food that was contacting packaging, and drinking water that has been contaminated.
The real end result of that piece should be the argument that we do not do enough to enforce the regulations we have. There are not enough inspectors, and unscrupulous places get away without strictly following the regulations. Instead it feels like they are attacking a practice that reduces food waste going into landfills, instead of attacking the company not following the correct practices.
Yeah, you can’t get any kind of useful information when it’s compressed into 30 seconds, and fed to you in a form that is designed to feed your dopamine receptors.
So many headlines for articles and titles for videos are written for clickbait value. It’s annoying.
On other hand the pork industry is horrifying for many other reasons and you should probably not eat any pork that doesn’t come from a local small farm.