On September 15, the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (LGMA) posted a white paper marking twenty years since the 2006 spinach outbreak that led to its creation. It is called “Twenty Years of Progress,” and its executive summary ends on a line I agree with: food safety is never finished.

Four days earlier, CDC declared the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak linked to Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce over. CDC’s final count was 12,883 illnesses in 21 states, at least 570 hospitalizations and two deaths in Michigan. FDA says it is still investigating how the lettuce was contaminated. The white paper does not mention Cyclospora, this outbreak, Mexico or iceberg lettuce.

I have sued lettuce companies for nearly thirty years. I also think the LGMA is the organization best placed to keep the next one of these outbreaks from happening. This post is about both: what the LGMA has said this summer, what it has not, and work we could do together.

What the LGMA said this summer

The LGMA was not silent in July and August. Its public record, in order:

• July 15 and 24. LGMA’s first outbreak statement called lettuce a leading suspect and noted that CDC had discontinued routine national reporting of cyclosporiasis in 2025 after budget cuts. By July 24 a different statement sat at the same web address: sympathy for those sickened, credit to health officials, and acceptance of Mexican-grown lettuce as the likely source. I wrote about the swap in July, and said then that the deleted paragraph was the truest thing any trade group had said about the outbreak.
• July 20. The California and Arizona LGMAs held a public webinar with food safety scientist Dr. Jennifer McEntire on what is known and unknown about Cyclospora, including why testing produce and water for the parasite is so hard. California LGMA CEO Tim York said the goal was to cut through confusion and misinformation.
• July 27. York told CBS News that LGMA membership is voluntary, but “once they join, they must follow our rules.”
• August 9. California LGMA said California lettuce and leafy greens were in full production and not associated with the outbreak, and published a fact sheet on why its members’ greens are low risk for Cyclospora. Arizona LGMA posted its own.
• August 20. LGMA reported hosting five FDA produce safety staff on an August 12 farm tour in the Salinas Valley.

The webinar and the FDA tour were good work. The paragraph that got deleted was good work too.

What the LGMA has not said

Since August 9, I cannot find anything either LGMA has said publicly about the outbreak, on its website or in the press. There was no statement when CDC closed the outbreak, and none on FDA’s continuing investigation. There has been nothing on the roughly 7,000 laboratory-confirmed, U.S.-acquired cases this season that are not tied to any food. CDC’s case page now counts 19,883 confirmed domestic cases from May 1 through August 31, against the outbreak’s 12,883. The two counts carry as-of dates four days apart.

The white paper names two outbreaks, spinach in 2006 and Yuma romaine in 2018. It never names a pathogen, not even E. coli O157:H7 in 2006. The 2019 and 2020 romaine E. coli outbreaks appear only as timeline entries about “new risks” and “food safety updates.” Yet one of the twenty changes the paper lists is root cause investigation after food safety events.

Why the LGMA is in a unique position to lead

Taylor Farms is an LGMA member. It is on the California LGMA’s 2025 certified member list, it holds a seat and an alternate seat on the Advisory Board, and its people sit on the Communications and Technical Committees. The lettuce that sickened 12,883 people came from Taylor Farms de Mexico, outside the program the LGMA audits. A family buying a bag of shredded iceberg sees a brand, not a farm. For them there is no line between a member’s California lettuce and the same member’s Mexican lettuce. The company’s outbreak and recall history is its own story; the point here is that the grower at the center of this outbreak helps govern the program.

That is the problem, and it is also the opportunity. The LGMA has things no regulator or advocacy group has:

• Reach. The white paper says LGMA members grow 94 percent of U.S. leafy greens.
• Speed. Membership is voluntary, compliance is not, and audits are done by the California Department of Food and Agriculture under USDA oversight. The white paper counts more than twenty updates to LGMA standards in twenty years. Federal rules take years each.
• Data. Through Romaine Test & Learn, members already pool pathogen-testing results.
• A shared stake. California farmers told Ag Alert in August that the loss of consumer confidence was the worst since the 2006 spinach outbreak. Growers who did nothing wrong paid for this one.

The white paper’s own 2026 strategic plan names public trust building, through accountability and transparency, as one of three priorities. This is the moment for it.

Ten things we can work on together

1. Close out the outbreak in public. Acknowledge the final count, the people sickened and the two who died and commit to report what members learn from it.
2. One standard for the label, wherever the lettuce is grown. Members’ leafy greens from outside California and Arizona should meet LGMA-equivalent standards, verified by audits comparable to CDFA’s. Where they do not, buyers should be told which product is outside the program.
3. Write Cyclospora into the metrics. Cyclospora comes from human feces, so the controls are field sanitation and handwashing, keeping sick workers out of harvest, and protecting water sources. Workers need paid sick leave for staying home to be possible. LGMA’s own webinar stressed that testing is not the answer, which means prevention has to carry the load, and better detection methods deserve research money through the Center for Produce Safety.
4. Publish the root cause. When FDA finishes its investigation, the LGMA should say publicly what it will change. The public should see root cause findings, not just be told they happen.
5. Name the grower when the file closes. In November 2024, a romaine E. coli O157:H7 outbreak sickened 89 people in 15 states, hospitalized more than a third and killed one. FDA closed it in February 2025 without naming a grower or processor. On September 10, FDA closed a fourteen-person romaine outbreak, reference #1382, the same way, saying the lettuce was past its shelf life. FDA has named farms, processors and brands in that exact situation before. The LGMA should ask FDA to name growers and processors when traceback reaches them, and members whose product was in a traceback should say so themselves.
6. Share the data with public health. Expand Romaine Test & Learn to other crops and to water and environmental results, and give FDA and CDC access as results come in.
7. Bring back the Microbiological Data Program. From 2001 to 2012, USDA’s Microbiological Data Program worked with state agriculture departments to test fresh produce for pathogens. At about $4.5 million a year it was more than 80 percent of government produce testing when its funding ended. The produce industry lobbied to eliminate it. FDA’s Donna Garren has now called for a national approach to produce microbiological data like it. This is surveillance, not testing as prevention, and it tells FDA, CDC and growers where the risk is. LGMA support for its return would carry weight in Congress.
8. Meet federal traceability rules now. The compliance date for FDA’s food traceability rule under FSMA Section 204 has slipped to July 2028. The white paper says members already keep extensive electronic records. They can meet the rule ahead of the deadline.
9. Open the neighbor’s gate for E. coli. Leafy greens E. coli investigations keep pointing to nearby cattle, and investigators often cannot get onto adjacent animal operations to sample. I have drafted a citizen petition asking FDA to use its existing public health authority to get that access during outbreak investigations. The LGMA’s support would matter.
10. Stand up for public health capacity. This industry needs outbreaks found fast and sources named fast. Say so to Congress when CDC, FDA and state laboratory budgets are on the table, and support affordable Cyclospora testing so sick people get counted.

An invitation

I have been on the other side of the table from LGMA members for a long time, and I expect to be again. I would rather not be. The LGMA was built after a tragedy by growers who decided the whole industry had to change because one company’s problem was everyone’s problem. A leafy greens executive says exactly that in the white paper. This summer taught the same lesson again, at more than sixty times the size of the 2006 outbreak.

The LGMA says food safety is never finished. I agree. Let’s finish the next piece of it together, and I would welcome the conversation.

I have spent more than 30 years representing people sickened by contaminated food. I do not often read a speech by an FDA official and find myself agreeing with nearly every line. This week I did.

Dr. Donna Garren, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Produce Safety, spoke on Sept. 15 at the annual meeting of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture in Portland, Maine. I could find only two outlets that covered it, Agri-Pulse and Lancaster Farming, and both are worth reading in full. Her message, in short: the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak exposed weaknesses in how we oversee fresh produce, and FDA needs a system that finds hazards before people get sick rather than after.

She has been on the job less than three months. She joined FDA effective June 29, after nearly 15 years at the American Frozen Food Institute and earlier leadership roles at Boskovich Farms, the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, the National Restaurant Association, the Consumer Goods Forum and NSF International. Her office writes FDA’s regulations, policy and guidance for fresh fruits and vegetables, including the minimum standards under the FSMA Produce Safety Rule. That background matters. When someone who has spent a career working alongside industry says the system has to change, growers and processors will hear it in a way they may not hear it from me.

Never let a good crisis go to waste

The numbers are hard to overstate. According to FDA, CDC reported 19,595 laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis in the United States as of Sept. 8, including more than 12,000 from one multistate outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. CDC declared that outbreak over on Sept. 11. Two people died.

Garren told the state agriculture officials that the outbreak should be a moment of reckoning for FDA, because it showed a food safety system that does not always reflect the complexity of today’s global supply chain. Then, according to Lancaster Farming, she reached for the old saying: never let a good crisis go to waste. She is exactly right, and that saying is the history of food safety in this country.

Crises are how this system changes. After the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak, USDA declared E. coliO157:H7 an adulterant in ground beef in 1994. Hamburger cases were the core of my practice for a decade, and today they are close to zero for my firm. That is the best thing to happen in food safety in my lifetime, and it came out of a crisis. After the 2006 spinach outbreak and the 2008 to 2009 peanut outbreak, Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act, signed in January 2011.

Crises also get wasted. Less than two years after FSMA was signed, USDA shut down its produce testing program. Fifteen years after FSMA, the food traceability rule Congress required, the tool that would let investigators trace lettuce faster, has been delayed again after pushback from industry. Attention fades when the case counts stop climbing. Garren is telling her own agency not to let that happen this time.

If we don’t act, shame on us

The sharpest line of the day did not come from Garren. It came from California Secretary of Food and Agriculture Karen Ross, who chairs NASDA’s Food Systems and Nutrition Committee, the committee Garren addressed. Speaking about how communication breaks down in every outbreak, Ross said: “If we don’t act on this, shame on us.”

She is right, and the “us” is broad. It includes FDA and USDA, the growers, processors and retailers, the Congress that writes the budget, the state agriculture departments in that room, and people like me who have been making these arguments for more than thirty years. More than 19,000 people were sickened in one season, more than 12,000 of them in a single outbreak, and two people died. If a year from now all we have is another round of statements, with no testing program, no rule on naming firms and no published root cause, then shame on all of us.

She wants produce testing back

This is the part of her speech I most want to highlight. Lancaster Farming reports that she wants FDA to reinstate a national approach to microbiological data on produce, similar to USDA’s Microbiological Data Program.

I know that program well. USDA ran it from 2001 to 2012, working with state agriculture departments to sample and test fresh fruits and vegetables for foodborne pathogens, and it ended in December 2012 when its funding was eliminated. In its final year it was a $4.5 million program that accounted for more than 80 percent of government produce testing. The Associated Press reported in 2012 that it had found more than two dozen contaminated samples that led to recalls of lettuce, tomatoes and other foods. I argued at the time that ending it was a mistake, and I have said so many times since. Hearing a senior FDA official say publicly that something like it should come back is welcome news.

She wants the data used before people get sick

Garren described a system that brings together surveillance data, inspection records, outbreak histories and even satellite imaging to flag hazards before illnesses occur. That is the right goal. FDA already holds much of this information. All summer I have been tracking FDA’s own outbreak investigations table, where many files list no food, no on-site inspection, or both. The information exists. What has been missing is putting it to work, and putting it in front of the public. A director who wants to do both has my support.

Same rules for everyone

She said domestic growers, foreign farms and importers must be held to the same standard, and that fairness and public health point in the same direction. That principle matters. The Associated Press found that FDA inspections of foreign food sites are down nearly 35 percent since 2019. When I went through FDA’s investigations table in August, eleven of seventeen open investigations showed no on-site inspection, and the six that did all involved firms on American soil. Parity is fair to American farmers and safer for American consumers.

Name them

Here is the line from her speech I would put on the wall. Garren called transparency both a value and a mechanism, and she said: “When bad actors know they will be named … behavior changes.” She added that this means publishing outcomes, sharing data, and showing that oversight is real and applied without exception.

I have been making that argument in outbreak after outbreak. Earlier this month FDA closed a summer E. coliO157:H7 file by saying romaine lettuce caused it, naming no grower and no processor. Stop Foodborne Illness has a citizen petition pending at FDA, Docket FDA-2026-P-1448, on naming the firms tied to outbreaks. Garren’s principle, applied, answers the question that petition asks.

States as partners

She also wants FDA to work more closely with state agriculture departments and to share information better, describing state staff as the boots on the ground who talk to producers every day. The old Microbiological Data Program ran through state agriculture departments, so a closer federal-state partnership is exactly how a revived testing program would work.

How to make it stick

A speech is a start. Three steps would turn what she said into policy: funding for a national produce testing program in the next federal budget, a rule requiring FDA to name the firms linked to outbreaks, and publication of the root cause findings in the iceberg lettuce outbreak, which FDA says it is committed to sharing. Each of those follows directly from her own words, and together they are what not wasting this crisis looks like. If she wants allies in getting them done, she has one here.

Garren told Lancaster Farming that friends say she picked the worst time to join FDA. She disagrees, and said she likes figuring out what happened and building plans that keep it from happening again. After this summer, that is exactly the attitude the job needs. Welcome, Dr. Garren. Keep saying it.

On September 17, Representative Rosa DeLauro and twenty-four other Democrats in the House and Senate wrote to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asking USDA to stop closing the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center and to put its Cyclospora research back to work. It is the fifteenth congressional letter on the 2026 outbreak, the second to USDA in four days, and the first signed by members of both chambers. DeLauro’s announcement names seven lawmakers; the letter itself carries twenty-five signatures, seventeen from the House and eight from the Senate, including Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. That makes six House letters, eight Senate letters and one from both, all from Democrats. I last wrote about the letters on September 15. As of this afternoon I still cannot find a published answer to any of them.

The letter says the outbreak has sickened nearly 20,000 people. CDC’s case data put it at 19,883 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases for the May 1 to August 31 season, with 1,064 hospitalizations and two deaths in forty-nine states and the District of Columbia, as of September 15. CDC says that was its last weekly update; the page will now change only periodically. On September 11 CDC declared the outbreak over with 12,883 illnesses tied to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. That leaves exactly 7,000 confirmed cases this season with no food named. FDA says its investigation continues. Where those 7,000 people picked up the parasite is a research question, and research is what this letter is about.

What the fifteenth letter adds

The fourteenth letter, from Representative Debbie Dingell and nine House colleagues, asked whether USDA would seek the congressional approval its reorganization requires. The fifteenth goes after the Department’s explanation. USDA told Politico, in a statement Reuters carried, that Congress did not fund two of the three Beltsville Cyclospora projects for fiscal 2026 and that none of the research has been disrupted. The members write that Congress ended that funding on technical advice from USDA that the researchers would stay at Beltsville and that the Department would keep their expertise without ending its Cyclospora work. That is the members’ account. USDA has not published one.

On the third project, which is still funded, the letter relies on Politico’s reporting that the scientists declined orders to move to Iowa, leaving no dedicated USDA staff to study the parasite. It asks five questions: whether all the Beltsville Cyclospora staff have declined to relocate and whether anyone has been hired to replace them; how many other projects will lose scientists; how USDA will keep the research uninterrupted; where the work will go and whether the receiving labs can handle it; and whether USDA will ship highly pathogenic organisms across the country, and how safely.

The members write that USDA has spent more than $170 million upgrading and repairing Beltsville since 2016, including a $32 million renovation of its food safety laboratory finished in 2022, and that the Agricultural Research Service receives more than $1.8 billion a year. They ask USDA to stop the closure and halt the reorganization. Unlike the Dingell letter, which asked for answers within two weeks, this one sets no date. It asks for a timely response.

Why it matters

For two months I have written that the letters asked about surveillance cuts, political influence and the recall, and that none of the first thirteen asked how to keep the next outbreak from happening. Two letters in four days now do. There is no whole genome sequencing for this parasite. CDC links cases by genotyping, and used it in this outbreak to show the parasites making people sick were genetically related. That science does not maintain itself.

In July, Secretary Rollins told a Hill audience that cyclosporiasis is an FDA issue, not a USDA one. On outbreak response that is mostly right. On research it is not, and two letters have now gone to the department that holds the bench.

Here is the whole list, updated. The column on the right is still the one to read.

I believe that is every letter and I am not certain it is. I have had to add letters after publishing before. No answer found means exactly that and nothing more; an agency can answer a member privately, and neither side has to publish it. If you have an answer to any of these, send it and I will correct this post.

The fix is in the next funding bill

USDA blames the fiscal 2026 appropriations law; the members say Congress acted on USDA’s own advice. Either way, the repair runs through one place. The November 2025 law that ended the shutdown carries both the Beltsville funding decision and Section 780, which bars FDA from spending money to administer or enforce the food traceability rule before July 20, 2028. Fiscal 2027 begins October 1, and the letter says Democrats are ready to build on existing Cyclospora research in the final funding agreement. Congress can restore the research and lift the traceability delay in that bill. Neither fix needs a letter. The Beltsville reversal does not even need Congress; the members write that it is wholly within the Secretary’s power to do immediately.

Still no hearing

Eight dated deadlines have passed without a published answer, the last on August 27. The Dingell letter’s two weeks run out around September 28, and the DeLauro letter set none. No committee has noticed a hearing. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which held a hearing on Cyclospora in imported raspberries in July 1998, can issue a subpoena; Senator Blumenthal wrote as its ranking member, and a ranking member cannot subpoena alone. The House Oversight majority can adopt Representative Garcia’s document request as the committee’s own. The Agriculture Committees oversee USDA, and the appropriators fund all three agencies. Twenty-five members signed the newest letter, and none of them holds a gavel. Every one of those tools belongs to the majority.

CDC has stopped counting weekly. Fifteen letters have put them in writing, and not one has a published answer. If a letter will not put anyone in a chair, a subpoena to a hearing will.