VIDEO: PETA Supporters Confront Ajinomoto CIO Over Deadly Animal Tests

For Immediate Release:
May 4, 2023

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

PETA supporters with signs proclaiming, “Ajinomoto: Ban Cruel Animal Tests Now!” and “Starved, Killed, Dissected,” gathered earlier today at the Chicago Venture Summit Future-of-Food 2023 at the coworking space at 167 N. Green St. to confront Hiroshi Shiragami, the chief innovation officer of Ajinomoto and a guest speaker at the event.

Photos and video footage is available here.

Ajinomoto is the world’s largest manufacturer of monosodium glutamate (MSG). The company, which also owns packaged frozen-food brands Tai Pei, Ling Ling, and José Olé, has conducted pointless and painful tests on animals to market its products since the 1950s.

“For decades, Ajinomoto has tormented thousands of dogs, guinea pigs, rabbits, and other animals, who feel pain just as we do, just to make dubious human health claims for marketing its foods, ingredients, and seasonings,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “Dozens of other global food giants have ended their animal tests and switched to superior, non-animal research—and Ajinomoto can, too.”

Ajinomoto-funded experimenters have cut open dogs’ stomachs, inserted tubes, starved them, given them liquid diets with MSG, and injected them with drugs. They have starved, killed, and dissected rabbits and cut the nerves of mice as well as compelling them to fight each other. They’ve inserted tubes into the arteries of day-old piglets and starved them, and they’ve electroshocked rats.

PETA’s global campaign has garnered more than 300,000 e-mails from supporters calling on Ajinomoto executives to end the company’s tests on animals that aren’t required by law. The group disrupted an event at Columbia Business School’s David Geffen Hall in February to urge Hiroshi Kaho, president and CEO of a U.S. subsidiary of Ajinomoto, to end its use of these cruel experiments.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.