What's Going On With Lettuce?

0:00Hey everyone, it's Jess. And Ryan. Before we get to today's episode, we're here to announce that we're planning our third live show. This time we'll be back in New York City. We'll be at the City Winery on Wednesday, September 9th. We've got special guests lined up, sharp reporting, insider conversations, all the kind of stuff that hits different when you're in the room for it. Also, Ryan and I are going to stick around after the show to hang out and meet you all, which really is our favorite part. Tickets go on sale this Friday, July 24th at 10 a.m. Eastern. Head to bit.ly slash journalnyc. That's bit.ly slash journalnyc.

0:40And we'll drop a link in the show notes too. So get a ticket or two or three or five. Or 10. Or 10. Bring your mom. And come hang out on Wednesday, September 9th in New York City. Hope to see you there.

0:59Some of the best summer meals are big salads full of fresh vegetables and leafy greens. But over the last couple of weeks, lettuce has been having a tough time. Federal health officials say shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by a California farm company is the likely source of a severe stomach bug outbreak across the U.S. And Jesse, are you eating lettuce right now?

1:29So I am eating leafy greens, but I have a pretty good garden, and so it comes from the garden. Our colleague, Jessie Newman, covers the food industry. And her garden-grown greens have kept her safe from the tainted lettuce that is the source of an outbreak of cyclosporiasis. We've got to talk about this parasitic illness that's making more people sick all across the country, including several cases here in Illinois. We're talking about cyclosporiasis. Well, for those of us who don't have our own leafy greens growing in the backyard, I mean, I'm sure this has been big news for the country. I mean, how big is this outbreak that we're talking about?

2:11Yeah, it's a huge, it's a really big outbreak. There are nearly 7 ,000 confirmed cases in 34 states, including Washington, and another 5 ,100 additional unconfirmed cases. Health officials traced the outbreak to products served at some Taco Bell locations. Iceberg lettuce could be the culprit, including some used by fast food giant Taco Bell. These were restaurants that had gotten their produce from a supplier called Taylor Farms. CDC investigators believe the likely source is Taylor Farms, a California fresh food supplier that provides lettuce to Taco Bell as well as packaged lettuce to major retailers, among them Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods.

2:57It seemed clear. The source of the outbreak was Taylor Farms. But over the weekend, a series of announcements from both the FDA and Taylor Farms led to confusion for consumers. For consumers to see these headlines and ask the questions you're asking, wait, is it still Taylor? Is it still Taco Bell? Is it still shredded lettuce? And I think it is really subpar for, you know, especially when you're in the midst of a public health emergency, for there to be, you know, confusing signals.

3:30Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, July 21st.

3:43Coming up on the show, what's going on with lettuce?

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5:03Cyclosporiasis is an illness caused by cyclospora, a parasite found on food. And outbreaks like this actually happen every year. By this time last year, there had been around 250 reported cases. But this time, it's much bigger than usual. Cyclospora has affected thousands of people across the country. Michigan, the hardest hit state, has reported more than 6 ,000 cases. And can you talk about the, like what it actually does to you? I think I'm going to make you say the phrase.

5:40Oh, the headlines. Oh, the headlines.

5:46So, cyclospora causes, you know, what is referred to as watery explosive diarrhea. Yep. Explosive diarrhea is the most common symptom. It's not the only symptom. There can be other symptoms, nausea, cramping, loss of appetite, bloating. but the one symptom that, you know, seems to be the most prevalent is this explosive diarrhea. And it can last. It can last for weeks and even months. Which is, you know, we laugh, but that is not pleasant. And it can be very consequential depending on who's getting it. Is it deadly? So no one in this outbreak has died. Complications, I think, are pretty rare. One of the main complications is dehydration, you know, when you're having that much diarrhea.

6:32You can get pretty dehydrated. So that is, I think that has been the cause of most of the hospitalization. So it can be very serious. The illness can be particularly dangerous for people who are pregnant or immunocompromised.

6:49Cyclospora outbreaks happen when produce gets contaminated by human fecal matter that contains the eggs of the parasite. And there are different ways an outbreak can start. One source can be the water that's used for irrigation or for washing. So all this produce is being handled in a single processing facility produced from many different farms. And then it gets spread. You know, this processing facility, often they are supplying, you know, either restaurant chains or grocers in multiple different states. So you get infected produce and then it gets distributed, you know, pretty widely. And that's how you wind up with sick people in different states.

7:29When an outbreak like this happens, the government steps in to figure out what's going on and what to do about it. The main agencies that do this are the Food and Drug Administration, or the FDA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC. So the first work that they do is they do patient interviews, and they start talking to people, and they just start asking people, like, what did you eat? And a lot of people reported eating at Taco Bell. Then what did you eat at Taco Bell? A lot of people reported eating menu items that included the shredded lettuce. Taco Bell said that the company took immediate action to remove the lettuce and that this is a nationwide issue.

8:07The FDA and the CDC started looking into where that shredded lettuce came from, a supplier called Taylor Farms. Is not a shock because Taylor Farms is a giant of the produce industry. And so for large restaurant chains, for grocery stores, they are tough to avoid. It's based in Salinas, in the Salinas Valley in California, what we call the salad bowl of the U.S. And they make billions of dollars a year. They make fresh-cut vegetables, salad blends, salad mixes in the grocery store. And they supply big restaurant chains, Taco Bell, McDonald's. and then they supply all the top grocers, Walmart, Whole Foods, Costco.

8:53Many of us are encountering Taylor Farms each day. After being identified as a potential source of the outbreak, Taylor Farms voluntarily recalled the affected lettuce from stores and restaurants, including the lettuce sourced from central Mexico. They said this was, quote, in an abundance of caution. This isn't the first time Taylor Farms was the source of a cyclospora outbreak. There was one in 2013. And in 2024, there was an E. coli outbreak tied to the company's onions and McDonald's hamburgers. Tonight, McDonald's says they've found the source of the onions linked to the deadly E. coli outbreak, naming Taylor Farms, a grower based in California.

9:35At the time, Taylor voluntarily recalled the potentially contaminated onions and said that it had not found traces of E. coli when testing its products. And is it typical for a company like Taylor Farms to experience outbreaks like this? What I asked food safety professionals was really twofold was when there are big food safety outbreaks, you know, it is just by virtue of their size and scale. They may be likely to be involved in them because they do provide so much of our produce. And of course, that's not an excuse. We shouldn't have these outbreaks. The FDA traced this most recent cyclospora outbreak to several Taylor Farms facilities in Mexico.

10:18They did this through what's called epidemiological testing. Scientists track what people tell them about when, where, and what they ate to try to figure out the source of a foodborne illness. The FDA then confirms the source of an outbreak through lab testing. In this case, they tested Taylor Farms lettuce to see if they had any cyclospora eggs on the leaves. The agency announced its findings on Saturday. They said that a sample of shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms had tested positive. What does this all mean for Taylor Farms? You know, this big company that supplies so many of the grocery stores and restaurants that we know, being tied to a major outbreak like this.

11:02It is not what you want as a business. And, you know, they've said that they're committed to working with public health authorities and that they understand that people trust them to provide safe food. This is also just a huge, you know, reputational blow to be linked to an outbreak like this. But then, over the course of 24 hours, things got very confusing.

11:30That's next. Thank you.

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12:42One day after the FDA said that a sample of Taylor Farms lettuce tested positive for cyclospora, the agency made a second announcement. That sample it tested was a false positive. And that there are no confirmed positive sample results for product testing for cyclospora. That's our colleague Sabrina Siddiqui, who covers public health. And now everyone is in a bit of a frenzy thinking, does this mean that they have not actually found any cyclospora on Taylor Farm products? And why didn't they just wait until they had all the test results before putting this information out in the public? To be clear, the FDA says this false positive doesn't change the findings of its broader investigation, which is that Taylor Farms is the source of this outbreak.

13:28The agency says the evidence showed that the contaminated lettuce did come from facilities in central Mexico that belonged to Taylor Farms. That wasn't the end of it, though. After the FDA walked back its lab results, Taylor Farms issued its own statement, saying that the FDA had apologized to them. And I think what Taylor Farms saw was an opportunity to say, They haven't actually produced a single positive product test result for cyclosporate. When the FDA was asked about this, an FDA official said that the agency hadn't issued a formal apology. They had just explained what had happened with this false positive test result.

14:06And in the mind of the public who's waking up on Monday morning and they're seeing all of this chaos around the cyclosporate outbreak, and it kind of creates this doubt in their minds. In a statement, Taylor Farms said they were, quote, committed to working closely with health officials during this ongoing investigation. Taylor Farms has also made a significant donation to the Trump administration. And last year, they donated$1 million to MAGA, Inc. So there are, at this point in time, there's been no evidence of political interference in this investigation. Has Taylor Farms said anything about this connection?

14:47Taylor Farms has not commented on anything related to political donations.

14:59So what actually happened here? What went wrong at the FDA that led to this debacle? I think that a lot of questions have centered on whether or not these significant cuts by the Trump administration had any impact on the handling of this outbreak. And you cannot draw a direct line, according to many people we spoke with, between the cuts and the outbreak itself, because the outbreak would have happened regardless. But number one, if there had been more resources within the federal government, then perhaps investigators and state health departments who have lost a lot of their funding because of these budget cuts could have tracked down the source of the outbreak earlier.

15:46And the other piece when it comes to this entire communications debacle, if you will, the FDA has seen a lot of cuts to its communications department. And so we have spoken with some former FDA officials who said that the lack of clarity is in part because you have an understaffed communications department and there are just far fewer people trying to do a lot more work around communicating through these outbreaks. And so it sounds like the fact was in this case, the communication was unclear from the FDA. The communication was very unclear, and what the FDA said in trying to justify the decision-making was, we are in the middle of an active outbreak.

16:37People are getting sick. So at the first sign that there was any product that was still testing positive for cyclospora, our instinct was to alert the public. Earlier today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, said the outbreak was under control. And he pushed back against the idea that departmental cuts had contributed to the outbreak. So when it comes to the cyclospora outbreak and the communications around it, around public health, who is accountable here? Is it the FDA? Is it Taylor Farms? I think when it came to the confusion that we saw over the weekend, that's where you had both sides at fault in some ways, because both sides create confusion around what exactly was happening.

17:26The FDA, by of course putting out a result that was not conclusive and then having to walk it back, and then Taylor Farms then using that to say, hey, there are no positive test results for a cyclospora in the government's hands. The broader investigation has still pointed to them as a source for the multi-state outbreak that's been in the news. And so the issue here comes down to sort of what is the public supposed to believe? And ultimately, like, what is the public supposed to do? What information should people be listening to? I think that this is one of the reasons why there was a lot of frustration with the FDA when we spoke to the former FDA officials who've dealt with these types of outbreaks before.

18:11There was a lot of, of course, benefit of the doubt around how hard it is to communicate during an outbreak. But because of this error over the weekend, now you have led the public to question not just if they've had the right source, but I think people wonder if the FDA and federal health authorities more broadly are sufficiently equipped at a moment like this and if they can, in fact, trust the information that's coming out of the government. And that is probably where most of the frustration has been that they have further eroded consumer trust. you can check Taylor Farms recall list online and see if any vegetables you eat or buy are on it

19:09that's all for today Tuesday July 21st the journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Heather Haddon, Amira McKee, and Bodhia Tway. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.