Trump Just Helped the World’s Largest Meat Company — the Same One That Sold Poisoned Meat for Pet Food and Used Child Labor

Last week, investigative journalist Eric Schlosser — the author of Fast Food Nation, the book that first exposed the American meatpacking industry a quarter-century ago — published an essay in the New York Times asking a simple question: why did President Trump personally clear 660 million pounds of foreign beef trimmings to enter the United States duty-free and largely uninspected?

According to Schlosser’s reporting, the answer traces back to Joesley Batista — co-controlling shareholder of JBS alongside his brother and a former JBS chairman who currently serves on its board of directors. Batista, previously jailed in Brazil after admitting to paying $186 million in bribes to nearly 2,000 politicians, met privately with Trump at the White House weeks before the tariff waiver was announced. Days later, per Schlosser’s account, the administration cleared the way for 660 million pounds of foreign beef trimmings — the raw material of hamburger — to enter the country duty-free.

JBS isn’t just another meat company. Add its beef and pork operations to its more-than-80% ownership of Pilgrim’s Pride — the second-largest poultry producer in the U.S. — and the combined empire makes JBS the single largest meat company on Earth.

That’s not an isolated favor. Brazil is the world’s largest beef-exporting country, and JBS is the largest single exporter in Brazil — the largest of the three companies that together control roughly two-thirds of everything the country exports. Batista met Trump again in the Oval Office in August 2026, specifically lobbying on beef tariffs. The tariff waiver was announced the next day. Days later, the European Union suspended Brazilian meat imports entirely over concerns about antibiotic misuse — leaving JBS’s export-ready slaughterhouses with nowhere to send their product except to the market that had just opened for them.

That’s this month’s headline — Trump, a convicted briber, and a tariff waiver timed just right. JBS’s history is a lot uglier than that.

JBS Was Caught Using Child Labor in 2022

In 2022, a Department of Labor investigation found that Packers Sanitation Services, a contractor hired by JBS, employed children as young as 13 on overnight shifts at JBS plants in Grand Island, Nebraska, and Worthington, Minnesota — cleaning dangerous equipment that included back saws, brisket saws, and head splitters, using corrosive chemicals.

The confirmed count climbed every time investigators looked again — and it likely understates the real number. Many of the children were unaccompanied migrants, and they were afraid to talk to investigators for fear that speaking up would get themselves or their families deported. Some of their parents were later charged with child abuse. Nobody who worked those shifts and stayed silent was ever counted at all.

Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier documented this in depth in her investigation “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.” At the JBS plant in Worthington, Minnesota, Dreier’s reporting was the tip that led investigators to find children working there in the first place. She spoke with kids coming off overnight shifts at the plant. Some, in her words, had “scratched their assumed names off company badges” — trying to erase any trace that they’d been working under false identities. Others told her they’d been burned by the corrosive chemicals used to clean the equipment.

It Happened Again. JBS Was Never Fined.

In January 2025 — less than two years later — the Department of Labor found continued child labor violations at JBS plants through 2024, this time expanding to Iowa and Alabama. And here is the part worth sitting with: JBS was never fined a cent for any of it.

The $1.5 million civil penalty from the 2022 case went to the contractor, Packers Sanitation Services — not JBS. JBS’s $4 million commitment in January 2025 wasn’t a fine either. The Department of Labor’s own announcement calls it a “commitment” — funding for scholarships, job training, housing assistance, and an advertising campaign in the towns where the violations occurred.

The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Administrator, Jessica Looman, praised JBS’s response as “creative and forward-thinking,” and said the company was “setting the standard as a market leader in preventing illegal youth employment.” The department’s own January 2025 announcement also disclosed that it currently has more than 1,000 open child labor investigations nationwide, and that in fiscal year 2024 alone, more than 4,000 children were found illegally employed. Nothing about this problem is solved. The government just made sure JBS wouldn’t be the one to pay for it.

JBS Sold Rendered Animal Fat Contaminated With a Euthanasia Drug — Then Refused to Recall It

This is the same company whose rendering business turns condemned and diseased material into pet food. And in 2018, that business was caught selling pet food companies a product laced with a euthanasia drug — then refused to pull it from the market.

JBS’s rendering business isn’t a side operation. MOPAC, its Pennsylvania plant, is one of the largest renderers in the Eastern United States.

In 2018, rendered animal fat (tallow) from that plant tested positive for pentobarbital — the drug used to euthanize animals. State inspectors confirmed it. FDA confirmed it independently. JBS kept shipping the fat anyway.

FDA’s own warning letter, issued April 2019, states plainly: “Our investigation revealed that you continued to distribute adulterated products after you received formal notification of pentobarbital contamination from your customer on February 13, 2018, and after formal notification of positive pentobarbital samples from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture on or about April 5, 2018.” When FDA directly asked JBS whether it planned to recall the product, halt distribution, or notify all its customers, the company said no to all three.

Read plainly, JBS’s own corrective action is a confession. The company told FDA it would start refusing equine ingredients — horses — and require suppliers to guarantee they would not deliver euthanized animals — meaning that before this investigation, JBS was accepting exactly that: dead horses and other animals killed with a euthanasia drug, with no verification of how they died. FDA’s own follow-up sample, taken after these guarantees were supposedly in place, still came back positive for pentobarbital.

Section 402(a)(5) of the FD&C Act has said, without exception, since long before any of this happened: food made from a diseased animal or one that died otherwise than by slaughter is adulterated. Nobody knows how long JBS was violating that law before it got caught. When it finally was caught, it refused to fix the part that mattered — recalling what was already in the marketplace. FDA’s own closeout letter, issued in November 2019, addresses only the company’s paperwork and food-safety documentation. It never mentions the recall. It never mentions dead animals entering the plant without being screened. The question—raised in 2018—of whether the contaminated product was actually gone was never answered again by anyone in the public record.

Today, MOPAC’s own product listing guarantees its rendered fat is “100% pentobarbital-free.” Nothing on the public record explains how that guarantee is verified.

JBS and the Rendering Industry

Strip away the brand names and JBS, Pilgrim’s Pride, and MOPAC are all doing the same thing: taking an animal’s condemned and inedible waste — the diseased, the parasitic, the cancerous, the parts federal inspectors have already ruled unfit for human consumption — and rendering it into pet food and animal feed. Beef and pork through JBS. Poultry through Pilgrim’s. MOPAC is one of the plants where that byproduct gets rendered.

Pilgrim’s Pride isn’t a separate company in any way that matters here — JBS owns more than 80% of it, and it’s the second-largest poultry producer in the United States on its own, with $18.4 billion in annual revenue.

JBS is best known as a meatpacker — the company that owns the slaughterhouses producing the beef and pork on American dinner tables. What’s less visible to most consumers is that JBS also owns rendering operations: facilities that take an animal’s condemned and inedible parts — material not fit for human consumption — and cook them down into fats, proteins, and meal.

JBS says this in its own words. Its official sustainability report states: “Nearly 100% of inedible byproducts are rendered to produce tallow and blood and bone meal, which we then sell to other companies to be used in consumer goods, such as cosmetics and pharmaceuticals or in livestock or poultry feed.” Read that plainly: nearly all of the inedible material from JBS’s beef, pork, and poultry operations — millions upon millions of pounds a year — is rendered and sold onward, framed on the same page as an environmental accomplishment.

In 2021, Ansen Pond, head of food safety, quality and regulatory for Pilgrim’s/JBS USA, told the American Feed Industry Association’s Pet Food Conference that JBS produces roughly 15.7 million tons of rendered byproduct meal and tallow annually. “This area of business is really growing for us,” he said. “We’re seeing a huge increase over the next few years in this area.”

What “Condemned and Inedible” Actually Means

This is the law governing JBS’s own plants and Pilgrim’s Pride’s poultry plants — the rules under which condemned material becomes an ingredient in pet food or animal feed rather than waste.

Federal law spells out in exhaustive detail exactly what gets cut off from an animal carcass and set aside. The government’s own term for it is “condemned” — livestock found, in the law’s words, “in a dying condition, or affected with any other condition or disease that would require condemnation of its carcass.”

The actual field manual federal inspectors use every working day is FSIS Directive 6100.6, “Post-Mortem Dispositions for Public Health Veterinarians.” It walks veterinarians through disease after disease, in clinical language most consumers have never seen. Eosinophilic myositis — a muscle disease that leaves “yellowish-green, yellowish-white, and red spindle-shaped lesions” in the heart and tongue. Sarcocystosis — a parasitic infection that produces rice-grain-shaped cysts in the esophagus and muscle. Cysticercosis — a tapeworm’s larvae, embedded in a carcass’s heart, tongue, or muscle as fluid-filled “vesicles,” or small balloon-like bladders; inspectors are trained to slice into the cheek muscles, heart, and tongue specifically to find them. And ocular squamous cell carcinoma — cancer of the eye — with its own instructions for handling metastasis, necrosis, and “the formation of pus.”

For each of these, the manual doesn’t stop at diagnosis. It says, in the government’s own words, that the carcass “is eligible for shipment for animal food (pet food),” once a supervisor signs off and the establishment “identifies, slashes freely, and denatures” the material before it leaves the building. That instruction, or one just like it, follows disease after disease in this manual — a document that names pet food, again and again, as the destination for material just diagnosed with cancer, parasites, or degenerative disease.

This isn’t a hidden rulebook. It’s public, and it’s the actual manual federal inspectors are trained on. The broader legal authority behind it — the specific regulations defining what “condemned” covers and where that material is allowed to go — is cited in full in the sources below. What matters here is simpler: the law spells this out in writing, disease by disease, and pet food is the stated destination.

How Condemned Meat Gets Marked So No Human Eats It

This is what happens inside JBS’s own slaughterhouses, and Pilgrim’s Pride’s, before condemned material can leave the building.

Before condemned material can leave a slaughterhouse, federal law requires that it be denatured — treated in a way that makes it visually, physically impossible to mistake for something a human might eat.

The regulations governing how this is done, at plants including JBS’s, read like something out of an industrial horror story. Under 9 CFR § 325.13, condemned meat and organs can be marked by dyeing them with FD&C Green No. 3, Blue No. 1, or Blue No. 2 coloring, or by blackening them with charcoal to a specified minimum darkness, as verified by inspectors against an official government reference chart. Alternative agents include crude carbolic acid, cresylic disinfectant, or a mixture of citronella oil and dye. Rendered fat gets its own treatment: mixed with fuel oil, powdered charcoal, or brucine — a toxic alkaloid related to strychnine.

Once treated, the entire labeling requirement is a single word stamped on the outside of the container: “inedible.”

There is one significant exception. A plant equipped with its own on-site rendering — what the regulations call “tanking” capability — can move this material internally without denaturing it at all, because it technically never enters interstate commerce. A large, vertically integrated company that owns both the slaughterhouse and the rendering plant next door can, in other words, skip the entire dye-and-charcoal step. Independent oversight of that internal movement is minimal by design.

The USDA Permits Diseased Meat in Pet Food. The FDA Calls It a Crime.

Here is where the story gets genuinely strange, and where two federal statutes point in opposite directions on the same material.

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act — the law the FDA enforces — defines “food” to explicitly include “articles used for food or drink for man or other animals.” Pet food and animal feed are legally considered “food” under this Act and are subject to the same adulteration standards as anything a person might eat.

Section 402(a)(5) of that Act states plainly that food is adulterated if it is, in whole or in part, “the product of a diseased animal or of an animal which has died otherwise than by slaughter.” There is no carve-out in the statute for animal food. There is no exception for material USDA has cleared for diversion. The law says: diseased-animal material is adulterated, period.

For more than forty years, the FDA maintained written policies — Compliance Policy Guides 675.400, 690.300, and 690.500 — stating the agency would not “ordinarily” act against pet food made this way, effectively authorizing the practice without ever changing the underlying law. In April 2019, the FDA withdrew all three, stating that use of such material would now be treated as illegal under the FD&C Act.

Nothing about USDA’s regulations changed when that happened. Sections 314.10 and 314.11 — the rules explicitly authorizing the diversion of condemned material to animal feed — remain fully in force today, unaltered, on the books. USDA’s authority comes from a different statute entirely (the Federal Meat Inspection Act) and covers only what happens up to the loading dock: is the material marked correctly, is it denatured, and can it legally leave the building? USDA has never had the authority to clear anything under the FD&C Act. That was never its law to enforce.

The result: one federal agency’s regulations affirmatively authorize the diversion of this material into pet food. Another federal agency’s governing statute calls the same material adulterated the moment it’s used for that exact purpose. Both are simultaneously true and in force right now. Nobody has reconciled them.

The Rendering Industry Admits Condemned Meat Goes Into Your Pet Food

None of what follows required investigative digging. The rendering industry says this openly, on the congressional record.

The North American Renderers Association’s own president told a U.S. House committee in 2022 that rendering “recycles and reuses this material to create nutritious pet food, animal and aquaculture feed, biodiesel, and countless other useful products.” The association’s public website makes the same claim today: rendered material “become[s] ingredients for animal feed and pet food, renewable biofuels, and essential materials.”

This is industry’s own description of its business, delivered proudly to Congress. It sits directly beside the FDA’s own 2019 statement that the underlying material is illegal to use this way. The contradiction doesn’t need to be uncovered. It needs to be pointed at.

This is JBS’s business specifically, not just an industry abstraction. The 15.7 million tons of rendered material JBS reported producing annually flows through exactly this framework — sold under a legal cloud FDA created and then walked away from.

No One Checks Whether Child Labor Ends Up on Your Plate or in Your Pet’s Bowl

This is, in the end, a story about three federal agencies with three separate blind spots.

USDA oversees meat processing at these plants — both what becomes human food and what gets condemned and diverted — but has no mandate to examine labor conditions and no authority under the FD&C Act.

The Department of Labor oversees labor violations and holds a real legal tool — the hot goods provision — that could theoretically block the shipment of anything produced at a plant with an active child labor violation. There is no evidence that tool has ever been used against JBS.

The FDA oversees whether the resulting pet food is legally adulterated, has no mechanism to ask whether the plant that produced an ingredient was under a labor investigation, and has no jurisdiction over the hot goods question in the first place.

No agency tracks whether condemned material — or, for that matter, meat headed for human consumption — from a plant under active child-labor investigation was ever flagged, held, or distinguished from ordinary product. This isn’t one party hiding something. It’s a structural absence of any mechanism designed to even ask.

The same JBS plants under child-labor investigation also process meat that ends up in the human food supply. A family’s steak and their pet’s dinner can trace back to the exact same building — processed under the exact same conditions, by the same children the Department of Labor has already documented, at a company the government just called a market leader.

Upton Sinclair Wrote About Child Labor a Century Ago. It’s Still Happening.

Somewhere in all of this is a child, working a night shift on a kill floor because their family needed the money badly enough that a fake ID and a warehouse of blood and machinery felt like the only door open to them. And somewhere else, that same night, a family sits down to a plate of pork chops, while their dog or cat eats from a bag of pet food bought at the same grocery store — with no idea that both meals may have passed through the hands of that same child. There’s no way to check. Nothing on either package says JBS.

More than a century ago, Upton Sinclair wrote about a boy named Stanislovas in his 1906 novel, The Jungle — fourteen years old, carrying a forged certificate that let him slip past the plant door, sent to work a lard machine because his family needed the three dollars a week. That book shocked the country into finally changing the law. More than a hundred years later, there was still a child on a kill floor for someone to find.

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Sources for this article:

• Eric Schlosser, “Why Did Trump Order Up 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat?“, The New York Times, September 7, 2026
• Hannah Dreier, “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.,” The New York Times (Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation)
• U.S. Department of Labor news release, November 9, 2022 — Packers Sanitation Services, Inc./JBS child labor findings
• U.S. Department of Labor news release, January 13, 2025 — JBS $4 million settlement
• 9 CFR § 301.2 — Definitions, including “U.S. Condemned,” “U.S. Inspected and Condemned,” and “Inedible” (eCFR)
• 21 U.S.C. § 604 — Federal Meat Inspection Act, “Inspected and condemned” statutory language
• 21 U.S.C. § 641 — Federal Meat Inspection Act, prohibition on transporting condemned material in commerce unless denatured or otherwise identified
• 9 CFR § 381.1 — Definitions for poultry products, including “inedible” (eCFR)
• FSIS Directive 9510.1 — Importation of Undenatured Inedible Meat, Fat, Rendered Fat, Poultry, and Egg Products
• 9 CFR Part 311 — Disposal of Diseased or Otherwise Adulterated Carcasses and Parts (eCFR)
• 9 CFR Part 314, § 314.3, §§ 314.10–314.11 — Handling and Disposal of Condemned or Other Inedible Products at Official Establishments, including the “freely slashed” denaturing requirement (eCFR)
• 9 CFR § 325.11, including § 325.11(d)(3) (labeling requirements — “Dog Food,” “Cat Food,” “Horsemeat for Pets,” “Beef Stew for Dogs”) and § 325.13 (denaturing procedures, including “freely slashed”) (eCFR)
• FSIS Directive 6100.6 — Post-Mortem Dispositions for Public Health Veterinarians
• 21 U.S.C. § 342(a)(5) — Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, adulterated food provision
• FDA guidance on animal foods and feeds (fda.gov)
• FDA’s 2019 announcement withdrawing CPG Sec. 675.400, 690.300, and 690.500
• JBS USA, Sustainability Report — Waste Reduction and Recycling
• JBS USA, Sustainability Report — Facilities and Locations
• Jordan Tyler, “Changing the narrative around animal byproducts for pet food,“ Pet Food Processing, January 29, 2021
• Jordan Tyler, “Pilgrim’s to open $70 million pet food ingredient plant in Georgia,“ Pet Food Processing, March 5, 2021
• FDA, Warning Letter to JBS Souderton, Inc. dba MOPAC, April 23, 2019
• FDA, Closeout Letter to JBS Souderton, Inc. dba MOPAC, November 18, 2019
• JBS-MOPAC, product listing — company’s own current marketing claim of “100% pentobarbital-free” tallow
• North American Renderers Association, congressional testimony, House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, 2022

Further reading, from my own past coverage:

• JBS, World’s Largest Pet Food Ingredient Supplier, Caught Using Child Labor — my original 2022 reporting on JBS exploiting children and Packers Sanitation Services, Inc.
• Rendering + By-Products — archive of my prior coverage of the rendering industry