As I said the Guardian last week:

But for some advocates like Marler, whose law firm handles cases of victims who may be severely injured or even killed by food contamination, the delays are nothing short of inconceivable.

The traceability rule “allows product to get off the market faster so less people get sick – all of those things are good for industry, whose product is being besmirched by one entity”, said Marler.

“These grown white men who run these organizations are acting like 2-year-olds… They just don’t want to be told what to do.”

I have been asked a version of the same question all week, most recently by someone who reads this blog (1 of a few) and could not make it add up. I was being a bit too flip to the Guardian.

The fixes are cheap. They plainly help the people paying for this. Why would an industry that just watched a third of the California lettuce crop go back into the ground fight the traceability rule, kill the sampling program and stay quiet while the inspection money got cut? It does add up. 

It only stops adding up if you assume the industry is one actor with one interest. Break it into the people who actually made each of those decisions and every one of them was rational for whoever made it. Here is the arithmetic, as fairly as I can state it, and then the part that changed in July. 

Having one of my three degrees being in economics helps with this.

Compliance has a number next to it. The outbreak that never happens has nothing next to it.

The clearest illustration is a federal document, not an accusation. When the FDA proposed pushing the Food Traceability Rule from January 2026 to July 2028, it ran its own numbers. The agency put the forgone public health benefits of the delay at roughly 91 to 112 million dollars a year and the cost savings to industry at roughly 54 to 73 million. By FDA’s own primary estimate the delay destroys about 37 to 39 million dollars a year more than it saves.

It is worth saying plainly what that first number is made of, because the post-it-note version of this debate never does. Forgone public health benefit is not an abstraction and it is not a rounding item. It is illnesses that happen instead of not happening, hospital admissions, and deaths, converted into dollars by a federal agency using a published method. When somebody weighs ninety-one million against fifty-four million and concludes the delay pencils out, what is on the losing side of that ledger is people. Everyone running the calculation knows that. The convention of stating it in dollars is what makes it possible to run at all.

Traceability does not change how much loss there is. It changes who pays it.

This is the part I think most people miss, and it is the reason the incentive survives even when the total cost is obviously worse. Suppose you can find the lot in a day. The loss is privatized. It lands on the firm that shipped the bad product, which takes the recall, the judgment and the lost account. Now suppose you cannot. The loss is socialized across the whole category. Dick Peixoto in Watsonville pays it. Ryan Kelly in Salinas pays it, and so does whoever was going to fill his cancelled October order. Larry Cox pays it in 300,000 pounds of romaine. A cilantro grower in Chualar pays it on a two percent margin.

Any single firm running the odds that it will be the firm at fault is better off with the loss spread. Opacity functions as a subsidy, and the people paying the subsidy are growers who never touched the product. I am not describing a conspiracy. I am describing what the incentive says when you actually run it, which is why it persists across administrations and across commodities and why arguing about anyone’s motives is a waste of everyone’s time.

And there is a second column of payers that the growers list leaves out. As of August 20 the federal count of this outbreak is 10,930 people in seventeen states, at least 454 of them hospitalized, and two dead in Michigan. State health departments have counted more than thirty thousand. Cyclosporiasis is not a bad night. Untreated it runs for weeks and often a month or more, it remits and comes back, and the specific antibiotic that ends it only gets prescribed if somebody thinks to test for a parasite. The first person in this outbreak got sick on June 14. The food was not named until July 17. Thirty-three days, and the product kept moving the entire time, because nobody could say which lot it was.

A trade association aggregates the median dues payer, not the industry.

The members with the most complex supply chains carry the highest absolute compliance cost and generally the most weight in the room. The organic grower in Santa Cruz County who just laid off harvest crews carries neither. The position that gets filed therefore reflects the members who would pay for the rule rather than the members who pay for its absence, and those are two different sets of people. That is not corruption; it is arithmetic. It is also exactly why I keep saying the associations are the ones who could move tomorrow without anyone’s permission. Their own membership has changed sides underneath them this summer.

That is not a guess about where the membership sits. It is on the record. The International Fresh Produce Association, the largest produce trade association in the country, said in its own statement on July 15 that it has long championed end-to-end traceability and that it and its members are on the record against continued delays with the Traceability Rule, and its revised version asks Congress and the Administration to implement end-to-end traceability and secure resources for state produce safety programs. The National Restaurant Association, whose sector usually gets named as the source of the pressure, calls the rule on its own member guidance page a measure expected to result in fewer foodborne illnesses and deaths, and tells restaurants to prepare now. The editorial board of the Delmarva Farmer, a paper written for the people who grow this food, called for exactly this infrastructure in the middle of the season — electronic purchase records, standardized lot coding, interoperable databases — without ever naming the rule it was describing. Western Growers now has three officers pointing the same way. And Jeff Church at Church Brothers Farms has asked retailers to stop letting silence fill the gap and start telling shoppers about the food safety and traceability programs their suppliers already run. Post outbreak, Taylor Farms says it fully supports and endorses the Food Traceability Rule and that it has already implemented traceback protocols across its operations ahead of the compliance deadline, calling any suggestion that it opposes traceability legislation absolutely false. On the same page the company describes every lot as carrying continuous chain-of-custody documentation from field to shipment, which it says enables real-time traceback rather than after-the-fact reconstruction.

The Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement is the most interesting case, because its answer is in what it built rather than in what it has said this summer. It exists because of 2006. After the spinach outbreak the leafy greens industry wrote traceback and recall protocols, farm water metrics and mandatory government audits into a voluntary agreement that now covers roughly ninety percent of the nation’s lettuce, and it has revised those metrics repeatedly since, including more than fifty changes to farm water use and field sanitation approved in a single vote. This summer it hosted a public webinar on this parasite and posted the slides, and its chief executive said the point was to give the industry practical, evidence-based information it could use that day. The same webinar conceded that important questions remain about how Cyclospora gets into the production environment in the first place. An organization that already writes water standards, already revises them on new science, and says out loud that it does not yet know how this parasite arrives is one metric revision away from what I am asking for. That one does not need Congress and it does not need FDA. It needs a vote.

The Microbiological Data Program was killed for working.

The MDP cost about five million dollars a year. It pulled 120,887 produce samples across 42 states between 2002 and 2011 and triggered 23 produce recalls in 2010 and 2011 alone. It was zeroed out in the fiscal 2013 budget. Read that from a single firm’s chair and the logic is immediate. A federal program that samples your product and generates recalls is pure downside, because the illnesses it prevents are invisible and the recall it causes is not. Nobody ever got a headline for the outbreak that the trip wire stopped. The program’s effectiveness was its liability, and it is the cleanest example in this whole file of a rational actor destroying something valuable to itself.

Their objections are not frivolous, and treating them as though they are loses the argument.

I want to be fair here, because the strongest version of my case has to answer the strongest version of theirs. FDA scored the delay as worth 16 to 22 million dollars a year to covered small entities, and compliance genuinely lands hardest on operations that do not have a compliance department. 

And the government has not held up its own end. Section 204 also directed HHS to build a system inside FDA capable of receiving traceability data and tracing food faster. GAO reported in January that no such system has been established, that FDA has completed 41 of 46 key requirements under the law, and that the agency now expects the tracing system to be finished by July 2028. Telling growers to hit a date the agency has missed for fifteen years is a real objection and it deserves a real answer, which is to fund and finish both halves rather than to delay the half that already exists. I have laid out how the fifteen and a half years actually went by and who filed for the delay, by name, from their own disclosures.

This exact thing happened in 2008, and the industry admitted it on the record.

In 2003 and 2004 the food industry pressed the Bush White House to limit produce recordkeeping, and a plan to require electronic tracking records was killed. Companies argued the proposals were too burdensome. Then came the 2008 Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak. More than 1,400 people were sickened, investigators chased tomatoes for weeks before the answer turned out to be peppers, and the paper recordkeeping system slowed them down. The Associated Press put the business losses at 250 million dollars and headlined the story as an industry bitten by its own lobbying success. Robert Brackett, then at the Grocery Manufacturers Association and previously a senior FDA food safety official, told the AP that broader and more far-reaching rules could have helped, and that they would not have hurt.

That concession is eighteen years old. The tomato growers who lost that season had no more to do with those peppers than Watsonville had to do with Guanajuato. The pattern is not new, and it is not a mystery. It is a rational choice, made repeatedly, that produces the same result every time.

The calculation stopped working in July, and the buyers noticed first.

All of the above held right up until the cost of being untraceable exceeded the cost of being traceable, and this summer it did. Sysco, the largest food distributor in the country, stopped buying iceberg from Mexico entirely and moved sourcing to United States growers, and its chief executive said in the same breath that Taylor Farms is a high quality, high integrity operation. Both things at once. When a buyer cannot show a customer which case came from where, walking away from the whole category is the only risk management left, even for a buyer who trusts the supplier. That is the private market imposing the discipline the rule was written to impose, and it is far more expensive than the rule would have been.

Set the numbers side by side. A peer reviewed analysis in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics put the total societal loss from the November 2018 romaine outbreak at 276 to 343 million dollars and concluded in its own words that the episode demonstrated the economic benefit of mandatory food safety standards and improved traceability. California lettuce alone was a 3.7-billion-dollar crop in 2024, and about a third of the harvest ready crop went into the ground this summer. Against that, the traceability rule is already written and merely delayed, and the sampling program cost five million a year.

The people best positioned to see that the price signal flipped are already saying so. Dave Puglia at Western Growers has said the outbreak showed a need to open the doors wider and give consumers greater visibility into the food safety practices the industry has built. He is right, and it is a notable thing for the head of that organization to say out loud in August of 2026. The answer to the question I keep being asked is not that anyone was foolish. It is that a calculation which was defensible for twenty years quit being defensible somewhere around the middle of July, and the institutions that made it have not caught up yet. They can. Nothing is stopping them but the admission.

Here is what catching up would look like, and none of it needs a new law. The trade associations that asked for the delay can withdraw the ask in a letter, this week, to the same appropriations subcommittee that received the original one. It costs nothing but the sentence. The Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement can put a Cyclospora specific water standard into its own metrics without waiting for FDA to write one, the way it wrote traceback and recall protocols into a voluntary agreement in 2007 after the spinach outbreak. That is what this industry does when it decides its collective reputation is worth protecting, and it has done it before within living memory.

The big buyers can finish what Sysco started. A traceability lot code written into a purchase agreement is not a regulation, does not need Congress and does not need a comment period, and it is far cheaper for everyone in the chain than a distributor walking away from an entire growing region. Every large retailer and foodservice buyer in the country already has the leverage to require it. And Congress can strike the rider, fund FDA to finish its own tracing system on the same clock it is asking growers to hit, and put back the five million dollar sampling program. Funding both halves on the same schedule removes the one objection to this rule that I think is genuinely fair, which is that nobody should be told to meet a deadline the agency itself has missed for fifteen years.

Every one of those moves does the same thing, which is why they belong together. They make the lot findable. And the ability to find the lot is the only thing that puts a loss back on the company that caused it. Do that and the next one is smaller, and it costs a single firm a bad year instead of costing Watsonville, Salinas, Chualar and Yuma a season they had no part in. Nobody has to concede they were wrong for twenty years to get there. They chose the economic case, which was their right, and for twenty years it was a defensible choice. They just priced it wrong. They only have to notice that the arithmetic changed in July, and that the cheap choice and the right choice are finally the same choice.

Might get a kick out of this – nearly 20 years ago – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq3X5PsUheg

It’s 3:00AM – you are hopefully asleep amd I am obsessing about traceability.

As of its August 20, 2026 update, FDA counts 10,930 people sick in the multistate Cyclospora outbreak traced to iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico and recalled by Taylor Farms de Mexico, at least 454 of them hospitalized, two dead, across 17 states, with illness onsets running from June 14 through August 11. Lower on the same page, under a heading FDA itself stamps updated 8/13/2026, the agency says distribution of the recalled lettuce was confirmed in thirty-one states and that, based on additional information, the product may have been further distributed to California, the District of Columbia, Delaware, North Dakota, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Washington. That sentence has been sitting on a federal outbreak page for ten days and I missed it.

The nine appeared on August 13, and the coverage that found them came a week later

I want to be precise about the date, because it is the whole point. FDA did not add those nine jurisdictions on Thursday. The Taylor Fresh Foods recall notice and the confirmed thirty-one-state list were both revised on August 13, when the agency also raised the case count to 9,481 and reported inspectors going into the plant in Guanajuato. The nine may-have entries went up in that same revision. Last Thursday’s update changed the counts, dropped the line about adding new states, and moved the inspection language from the processor to the lettuce growers themselves. It did not touch the distribution section at all.

What is new is that somebody finally read it. Patch ran separate state editions over Thursday and Friday telling readers in California and the District of Columbia that the recalled lettuce may have reached them, and framing it as something federal officials confirmed on Thursday. The date is off by a week. The story underneath it is not. Their point was that residents of those places went weeks without being told, and that is correct, and it is a fair thing to have noticed. It took a local news chain publishing automated state-by-state editions to put a federal outbreak footnote in front of anyone.

Washington’s own health department still tells residents the lettuce did not come here

I live in Washington, which is on the may-have list. The Washington State Department of Health outbreak pagecarries a background section marked updated August 7 that ends with a sentence set in bold: there has been no reported distribution of the recalled iceberg lettuce to Washington state. That sentence was accurate when it was written. FDA’s page has said something different since August 13, and as of this morning the Washington page still reads the way it did on the seventh.

This is not a page nobody maintains. The case block right below that paragraph is current through August 21 and reports 71 cyclosporiasis cases in Washington since May 1, two hospitalized, none dead, with 44 of the interviewed cases tied to travel to a country where the parasite is endemic and 8 people who did not leave the state at all. Three Washington residents are counted in the federal outbreak after eating at Taco Bell in Michigan and Indiana. Washington publishes more detail on where its residents were exposed than almost any state in the country, which is exactly why the stale paragraph stands out. The counts get refreshed weekly. The sentence that tells a person whether the recalled food reached them is sixteen days old and now sits crosswise with the federal page it links to. That page, incidentally, still points at FDA’s nine-state and fifteen-state advisory URLs, both of which have been renamed twice since.

I owe a correction of my own here. My fifty-state chart carried Washington at 36 for weeks, which was never a case total at all — it was the number of people the state had interviewed back in July. The real figure is 71.

I went looking for a statement from any of the nine and did not find one

California, the District of Columbia, Delaware, North Dakota, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington. I searched for a health department notice, a press release, a page update, anything from any of them acknowledging that they are on FDA’s list. I did not find one. That is not proof none exists, and if a reader sends me one I will post it and say so. But the absence is consistent with what Patch found and with what Washington’s page still says.

A may-have is not a scare, and it is not nothing either

The honest counterweight belongs right here. The best-by dates on this product ran out at the beginning of August. Nobody is going to find recalled lettuce in a refrigerator now, and a notice issued today would not pull a single bag off a shelf. A may-have is also not a confirmation; it means FDA received information suggesting the product moved further down the chain, not that it landed on a plate in Providence.

A notice would still do two things worth doing. It would tell somebody in Sacramento or Burlington who has been miserable since July that there is a reason to ask for a Cyclospora-specific stool test, which a routine ova and parasite panel does not reliably catch — that is CDC’s own advice to clinicians. And it would tell that state’s epidemiologists to go look. Both matter more this week than they did last week, because CDC said on August 20 that genotyping of samples from sick people shows the parasites in this outbreak are genetically related. One day later San Francisco used that finding to report that a resident’s infection was genetically associated with the multistate outbreak, in a city and a state with no confirmed distribution and no reason to have been looking. A case in a non-outbreak state can now be tied to this lettuce in a laboratory after the fact, which was not true a month ago.

There is a structural reason the home states stay quiet. CDC counts a sick person in the state where the exposure happened, not where they live, so a Californian who ate at a Michigan Taco Bell is a Michigan number. The state where that person actually lives, sees a doctor and shops for groceries has no entry for them and no particular prompt to say anything. The seventeen-state map reads tighter than the outbreak is, and it always has.

Nobody decided not to tell Delaware

I do not think anyone at FDA or at any of these nine health departments made a decision to keep this quiet. There was no meeting. The information was published, in public, in a federal document, by people doing the job in front of them, and then it sat there because putting it in front of the residents of nine jurisdictions was not on anyone’s desk. That is what a thin system looks like from the outside — not a scandal, just a gap where a person used to be. It is the same gap I have been writing about all summer, whether the subject is a parasite that got dropped from FoodNet, a plant that went seven years between inspections, or a traceability rule pushed out to 2028.

Traceability that ends in a footnote nobody is assigned to read is not traceability. It is a filing. The whole argument for knowing where food went is that somebody then tells the people it went to. My running fifty-state count has passed thirty-one thousand people this summer, and the reason I keep publishing it is that the numbers are the only part of this anyone can check. The distribution list ought to be the same. Nine states and territories are on it. Nine of them should say so.

As of August 20, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration count 10,930 illnesses in seventeen states, at least 454 hospitalizations and two deaths, with onsets running from June 14 through August 11, all of it traced to shredded iceberg lettuce processed by Taylor Farms de Mexico in Guanajuato and recalled on July 17. Not one of those illnesses has been tied to lettuce grown in California, in Arizona, or in a greenhouse in Brooklyn. Retail lettuce prices fell 16.4 percent in July anyway, the steepest one-month drop the Bureau of Labor Statistics has ever recorded for the category.

The federal record names one processor in central Mexico and nothing else.

The CDC outbreak page added 1,449 people on August 20 without adding a single state, which is the first update all summer that did not widen the map. It also carried something new. Public health investigators are running Cyclospora genotyping on samples from sick people, and CDC says the results show the parasites that caused these illnesses are genetically related. Read that precisely, because it matters in both directions. It ties the patients to each other.

FDA moved in the same update, and the move is the most interesting sentence either agency has written this month. A week earlier the agency described an onsite inspection at the Taylor Farms plant. On August 20 it described onsite inspections and sampling at iceberg lettuce growers in Mexico, plural, growers, alongside federal, state and international partners. The investigation went upstream from the building to the fields, which is where a waterborne parasite gets onto a leaf in the first place, and it is the one place no wash step can undo it.

Nothing in that record touches Salinas, Watsonville or Yuma.

California lettuce was never implicated. The California Department of Food and Agriculture and the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement said so plainly on August 12, and they were right. It did not help. California growers destroyed about a third of the lettuce crop that was ready to harvest. Dick Peixoto at Lakeside Organic Gardens in Watsonville laid off harvest crews and plowed his lettuce under and told Ag Alert his farm has about as much relationship to Taylor Farms bagged salads as it does to Oscar Mayer wieners. Ryan Kelly at Boutonnet Farms in Salinas watched the collapse erase his margin for the year and had his October orders cancelled outright. Larry Cox at Coastline Family Farms chopped up 300,000 pounds of romaine hearts and ran them back into the soil.

It is not only lettuce, and it is not only California. Sabor Farms in Chualar plowed under cilantro after demand sank by roughly 30 percent, on margins of about 2 percent, which is another way of saying the year is gone. Strawberry sales fell 14.7 percent, blackberries 16.4 percent and raspberries 28.1 percent between July 14 and August 1. California lettuce alone was a 3.7-billion-dollar crop in 2024. Every one of those growers is being priced for a parasite that arrived on somebody else’s product from another country.

The receipts show shoppers walked away from the category, not the lot.

The clearest evidence yet came out of verified grocery receipts. Fetch, a rewards platform reading receipts that represent roughly 212 billion dollars in annual United States retail sales, found shopping trips containing fresh lettuce down 10 percent over two weeks, salad mixes down 23 percent and packaged salad kits down 27 percent. Counted by individual shopper, it is worse. A quarter fewer people bought fresh lettuce at all, and buyer counts for mixes and kits fell by roughly 40 percent.

Then it spread. Of six additional produce categories Fetch examined, five were down or flat. Cucumbers fell 13.4 percent, cauliflower 5.6 percent, root vegetables 4 percent. Carrots were the only category to grow, by about a quarter of one percent. Frozen produce rose 17 percent in the same window with no change in promotions, so that was shoppers deciding, not retailers discounting. Pam Cerrone at Market 32 and Price Chopper confirmed the same pattern at the shelf: bagged salad down, fresh produce down overall, frozen up. NielsenIQ has iceberg down 25.4 percent and prepacked salads down 34.2 percent from July 18 to August 8, with all fresh produce down 9.9 percent.

Which is what the price collapse actually measures. Lettuce fell 16.4 percent from June, and it is still up 7.5 percent against a year ago, so the cheap lettuce is not a bargain arriving, it is inventory nobody would take at any price. Retailers cut hard on product that was never recalled and it did not bring the shoppers back.

Growers cannot plan, and that becomes next winter’s problem.

The forward-looking damage is worse than the summer damage. Nicole Minnich-Zapata at Misionero told The Packer that demand lifts one week and pulls back sharply the next without settling into any rhythm, and that this reads as a consumer confidence problem rather than a category problem. She is explicit that the acres being left in the field trace to soft orders and not to quality. Jeff Church at Church Brothers Farms says foodservice held up better than retail and expects another six weeks of soft demand, or longer. And in Yuma, where the winter crop gets decided right now, nobody is allocating acreage with confidence, because no grower can find out where the buyers intend to source. Seed gets bought and crews get hired on a guess.

I have made this argument before and I will keep making it, because it is the whole point of reaping what you sow. When you can name the grower in a day, one farm takes the loss. When you cannot, the category takes it. That is not a slogan. It is the mechanism that turned one processor’s iceberg into a national boycott of cucumbers.

Fund the genotyping, because CDC just proved on August 20 that it works.

Here is the ask nobody has made yet, and it is the one industry should want most. On August 20 CDC produced the first laboratory evidence of any kind in this outbreak, and it did it with genotyping rather than whole genome sequencing, which does not work on this parasite. One day later San Francisco used the same tool to tie a single resident of a state that is not in the outbreak back to the outbreak. That is a capability that did not exist in a usable form a month ago.

Scale it and it cuts both ways, which is exactly why growers should be lobbying for the money. Genotyping is the first tool in the history of this organism that can clear a supplier instead of merely accusing one. A California grower who is currently reduced to issuing press releases about not being implicated could instead be excluded by a laboratory. New York has 939 cases since May and no named source at all. Nobody has asked Albany whether its isolates have been typed, and nobody has appropriated a dollar to make sure they can be.

Count the parasite again and put the counting where the parasite lives.

On July 1, 2025, CDC cut its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network from eight pathogens to two. Cyclospora was one of the six dropped, for budget reasons, twelve months and eighteen days before the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history started filling Michigan emergency rooms. Restore it. Restore the state and local inspection funding two administrations cut, because state and local agencies do roughly half of all food processing inspections, ninety percent of produce safety inspections, every retail inspection, and all of the interviewing that attribution is actually built out of. Michigan interviewed more than 2,900 people to get where it got.

Then put the parasite where it belongs on the government’s own lists. Name Cyclospora in the agricultural water rule, where the only numeric criterion is still generic E. coli, an indicator organism that tells you nothing about whether this parasite is in the water. Add it to the National Wastewater Surveillance System, which runs about 1,500 sites across half the country and does not test for it. And rebuild something like the Microbiological Data Program, which cost about five million dollars a year, pulled 120,887 produce samples across 42 states between 2002 and 2011, and triggered 23 produce recalls in 2010 and 2011 alone before it was zeroed out. Set five million a year against a 3.7-billion-dollar California lettuce crop that just lost a third of its harvest.

Get the traceability rule in force, and make the states say where the cases came from.

FDA priced the delay itself. In its August 2025 proposal to push the Food Traceability Rule from January 2026 to July 2028, the agency put the forgone public health benefits at roughly 91 to 112 million dollars a year against industry cost savings of roughly 54 to 73 million. By its own primary estimate the delay destroys about 37 to 39 million dollars a year more than it saves, and Congress then wrote the non-enforcement date into an appropriations rider on top of it. Strike the rider and let the rule take effect. Every trade association that asked for the delay can withdraw the ask tomorrow, at no cost but the admission, and I have already gone through what each of them said and whether they still say it.

One more, and it is cheap. Make acquisition reporting routine. Florida already publishes, as an ordinary field in its weekly disease report, how many cases were acquired in state, out of state and abroad. Washington publishes the most detailed version in the country. Forty-five states publish nothing of the kind, which is why a category gets condemned nationally on the strength of seventeen states doing the asking. If every state reported where its cases came from, the map would stop looking like a map of which health departments had the staff to ask the question.

None of this is expensive. The outbreak is expensive.

I said in the last one of these that I would rather work with these organizations than shout at them, and I still would, and I said as much to Western Growers back in July. The surveillance line, the inspection money, the genotyping, the wastewater panel, the MDP rebuild and a rule that is already law and merely delayed add up to a rounding error against a single lost lettuce season. The growers in Watsonville and Salinas who plowed under a third of a crop they had nothing to do with paid more than that this summer, and they will pay again in Yuma this winter, and they have no way to stop it on their own.

The fastest way to make sure the next one lands on one grower instead of every grower is to be able to find the lot. I would like nothing better than to be put out of the fresh fruit and vegetable business. Nobody has taken me up on it yet.

I am working on a post as to why this keeps happening and what we all can do to prevent this.

As of Saturday, August 22, 2026, four foodborne outbreaks are running at once and every one of them is still open. The Cyclospora outbreak linked to recalled Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce stands at 10,930 illnesses in seventeen states, with a fifty-state count of 31,972. The Salmonella Javiana outbreak traced to Sinaloa jalapeños distributed by Coast Citrus Distributors stands at 431 in thirty-two states. The alfalfa sprout outbreak from Everything Sprouts of Minneapolis stands at 55 in fifteen states, and the company finally issued a recall Friday night. San Diego County’s Ramona outbreak, traced to raw eggs from the Happy Hens ranch, stands at twenty-three, and there is still no recall there at all. Here is where each one sits and what the coming week should tell us.

The Cyclospora count has not moved since Thursday, and two states have gone quiet.

Both federal pages froze on August 20 and neither has moved since. CDC’s outbreak page and FDA’s advisoryboth carry 10,930 illnesses, at least 454 hospitalizations, two deaths and seventeen states, with illness onsets running June 14 through August 11 and FDA stating outright that no additional states have been added. On the surveillance side, CDC counts 15,716 laboratory-confirmed cases acquired in the United States since May 1, with 828 hospitalizations, data current through August 17. The subtraction I ran Friday still holds: 828 hospitalizations counted this season, 454 of them attributed to the recalled lettuce, leaving 374 Americans hospitalized with this parasite and no food named for their illness.

What to watch. The reporting calendar does most of the work — New York reports Wednesday, Michigan and Florida on Thursday, West Virginia on Friday, and both federal pages have been updating Thursdays. Beyond that, two states have stopped talking. Ohio has published no statewide figure since August 13 despite reporting weekly all summer, and Indiana skipped its Friday update after telling readers on its own page that it posts Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays by one o’clock. If either one is still dark by midweek, that is a reporting story rather than a counting one. The larger thing to watch is genotyping. After San Francisco tied a single resident to this outbreak by laboratory relatedness rather than by interview, the question worth putting to every state with a large unattributed series is whether its isolates have been typed and what they showed. New York, with 939 cases and no source ever named, is the biggest of those. The season CDC defines closes August 31, nine days out. The counting does not.

FDA caught up to CDC on the jalapeño outbreak, and the Coast Citrus recall turns out to be 53,760 cases.

The gap I wrote about Wednesday is closed. FDA’s advisory now carries 431 illnesses in thirty-two states with 57 hospitalizations and no deaths, illness onsets running June 19 through August 2, and California added to the state list. It names Coast Citrus Distributors in its opening sentence. And the Coast Citrus recall that had no public notice anywhere for two weeks does exist in the enforcement record: Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert reportsthat the firm recalled 53,760 cases of jalapeño peppers on July 22, covering all product with pack dates of July 1 through July 31, classified Class I, distributed primarily to wholesale distributors in the central and East Coast states. That is the document the downstream companies have been recalling against since August 8, and consumers have not been able to read it.

What to watch. First, whether FDA ever posts a Coast Citrus company announcement on its recall page. An entry in a weekly enforcement report is not a public notice; it is a database record, and no shopper holding a tub of pico de gallo is going to find one. Second, whether the grower is named. FDA stopped hedging about the distributor this week, and the Sinaloa farm at the end of every one of these threads is still anonymous six weeks in. Third, and this is the one I would chase, Colorado. It is the second-largest state in the outbreak at 118 illnesses, and it appears on none of the downstream recall distribution lists. That is either a hole in the traceforward or a second vehicle nobody has looked for.

Everything Sprouts issued a recall on Friday, and FDA’s blank sample template is still attached to the bottom of it.

The counts hold at 55 sick in fifteen states with four hospitalized and no deaths, illness onsets May 31 through August 8, per CDC and FDA. The news is that the company acted. Everything Sprouts, LLC issued a voluntary recall notice on August 21 covering alfalfa sprouts in five-ounce plastic containers distributed from May 27 forward to third-party distributors and retail grocery stores in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Read the notice itself. It says the recalled products “include the following lot numbers” and then lists no lot numbers at all. There are no best-by dates, no UPC, no product photograph and no store list. The Calco brand, which both federal agencies name, is not mentioned anywhere. Only two of the four organisms are named. The company calls itself “Everyday Sprouts” twice, including in the sentence stating that no illnesses have been reported to it. Retailers and distributors are told to stop selling and dispose; consumers are given no instruction to return anything or get their money back. And below a row of hash marks at the foot of the document sits FDA’s blank sample press release, XYZ Inc. of Anywhere, Mississippi, recalling five-ounce packages of “Snackies” with lot number 666666 and an expiration date of 12/12/99. They published the form with the instructions still in it.

A correction of my own belongs here. On Thursday I wrote that FDA’s table is built one row per pathogen, so a genuinely multi-pathogen outbreak could never appear on it as a single entry. FDA’s active investigations tablehas since merged references 1394 and 1404 into one incident, stating that CDC identified four sick people infected simultaneously with three E. coli strains and Salmonella Agona and combined the associated clusters. The architecture bent. I was wrong about that, and it is a better outcome than the one I predicted. What to watch this week: whether FDA posts the recall on its own recall page, whether a corrected or expanded notice issues carrying actual lot codes and a distribution list, whether Calco gets added, and what came out of the inspection and sampling FDA began at the plant on August 19. The distribution list is the one that matters most, because it is still the only document that would say where this product went.

San Diego County split the Ramona outbreak in two, and the egg ranch has now made its actual argument.

The County raised the count to twenty-three confirmed and suspected cases on Friday afternoon and, as I wrote Friday night, broke the outbreak into its halves for the first time: eighteen illnesses tied to the house-made mayonnaise the County calls Ramona Red Sauce, sold at Ramona Family Naturals Market, and five in people who got sick from Happy Hens eggs directly. Seven have been hospitalized. The most recent case was detected August 16. Nothing has moved since. The County’s last full public update remains August 17, neither CDPH nor CDFA has issued anything of its own, and there is still no recall and no published customer list four weeks in.

The farm’s position has hardened into something more useful than a denial. Chloe Nevarez told NBC 7 that nine of the ill people share the same genotyping but that the health department never obtained a test sample from her farm. That concedes the human clustering and attacks the missing product isolate, which is the argument I expected and the wrong burden. Civil causation has never required a match between a patient isolate and a food; sequencing that ties the sick to each other, exposure histories, and a traceback converging on one supplier is the ordinary proof package. It is also worth saying plainly that a negative environmental swab pulled in August tells you very little about eggs laid in June, because this organism is shed intermittently and can reach the inside of an egg through the hen. What to watch: whether the farm’s own swab results, which its owner said were expected back Friday, ever become public; whether the five non-market cases grow, because that number is the entire reason a recall and a customer list still matter; and whether any record surfaces from the FDA inspection that CDFA confirmed took place at the ranch. An inspection generates an establishment inspection report. It may generate a Form 483. Those are the documents that would turn four weeks of argument into a record.

Four outbreaks, four different foods, four different agencies in the lead. The thing they have in common is not the pathogen. In every one of them, the piece of paper a person would need in order to protect themselves — a distribution list, a lot code, a customer list, a recall notice with a product photograph on it — arrived late, arrived incomplete, or has not arrived at all. The illnesses get counted either way.

Mia de Graaf published a piece at Business Insider this morning asking why the summer of 2026 has felt like one long food scare — Cyclospora in iceberg lettuce, Salmonella in jalapeños and shell eggs, E. coli in frozen blueberries, metal fragments in bread and glass in fruit bars — and whether any of it means the food supply is actually getting worse. She called me. She also called three people who spend their working lives counting this: Craig Hedberg and Melanie Firestone, both foodborne‑disease researchers at the University of Minnesota, and Jennifer McEntire, who consults for the industry side. The answer she came back with is more careful than most of what has run this month, and it is the right answer. Go read it.

She opens on the fact that my business is booming, which is the worst review a food system can get.

The first line of the piece is that my business is booming and that this is not good news for the rest of us. That is the correct way to read it, and I said as much to her. I have been doing this for thirty‑three years. She describes me as a towering figure in food safety, which is generous, and which I would point out is another way of saying that a single plaintiffs’ lawyer on an island in Puget Sound has had a thirty‑three‑year run of work. Nobody should want that job to be steady. This year it is busy enough that we are hiring for the first time in years — another lawyer and a couple of paralegals — because, as I put it to her less elegantly, we have too much to do. Every one of those files is a person who ate something.

The other line of mine she kept is the one I would want kept. Looking at this summer as a consumer, you are entitled to ask what is actually safe to eat. That is not hysteria. It is the reasonable reaction of somebody who read four advisories in six weeks and got no clear account of any of them. My whole answer to her question about whether this summer is as bad as it looks was five words: it is real, and it looks bad. Both halves matter. The illnesses are real and they are being undercounted; the appearance is also worse than the underlying trend, for the reasons she goes on to lay out.

The recall count is not a count of problems.

McEntire makes a point in the piece that belongs at the top of every recall story: when one contaminated ingredient goes into many finished foods, each of those foods gets its own recall notice, and the tally climbs while the number of underlying failures stays at one. Her example is the California Dairies recall in April of bulk powdered milk and buttermilk for possible Salmonella, which rippled downstream into more than a dozen products, from potato chips to ranch seasoning. US PIRG found the same shape in its own review: ten recalls in 2025 set off thirty‑one more because the contaminated ingredient had already been shipped, and all but two of those involved foods on the FDA traceability list. That is exactly the problem the traceability rule was written to solve, and enforcement of it now begins in July 2028.

We are better at finding outbreaks than we used to be — except for the one that has defined this summer.

Hedberg and Firestone both make the surveillance point, and it is an honest one. Whole genome sequencing has let public health laboratories connect Salmonella and E. coli cases that ten years ago would have looked like unrelated stomach bugs in five different states. Some of what looks like more illness is really more detection. De Graaf then does what most coverage skips: she notes that none of it applies to Cyclospora. The parasite will not grow in culture, there is no genome match to be had between a patient and a product, and the investigation therefore rests on what sick people can remember eating six weeks earlier. Hedberg’s summary of this year is the sentence to keep — “an order of magnitude bigger than anything we’ve seen in previous years.” CDC did say this week that genotyping shows the parasites from sick people are genetically related, which is the first laboratory evidence of the season. Read it precisely, though: it ties the patients to each other, not to any particular lettuce.

One farm’s problem becomes a national outbreak because that is how the system is built.

The 2006 spinach outbreak is the example I gave her, and twenty years later I still cannot improve on it. Investigators traced it to a single twenty‑acre field that had been visited by wild pigs. Not every plant was contaminated, but harvesting and processing spread what was, and the bags went to the whole country. Hedberg’s version of the same idea is the more useful one for a consumer: once fresh produce is contaminated, there is very little anybody can do to decontaminate it. There is no kill step between the field and the plate. A system optimized for year‑round lettuce is also a system that turns a local failure into a national one.

The cuts to food‑safety surveillance did not start last year.

She reports the 2025 reductions across the federal health agencies and the grant cuts to state and local health departments, and she prints FDA’s response that frontline investigators were exempt from past workforce reductions. Then she goes back further, which is the part I want people to notice. The USDA Microbiological Data Program — which sampled fruits and vegetables for pathogens and reported what it found, before anyone got sick — ended in 2012 when its funding was eliminated. That was a different administration and a different party. Proactive sampling has been a bipartisan casualty for fifteen years, and the case for bringing it back does not belong to either side.

Hamburger is the proof that this is fixable.

Thirty years ago, more than nine out of ten of my E. coli cases came from a hamburger. Today it is close to none. She has me giving the reason in six words — government intervention, and industry stepping up. That did not happen because consumers learned to use a thermometer. It happened because O157:H7 was declared an adulterant in ground beef, because the industry-built testing and process control around that rule, and because both sides of the table stayed on it for years. The pathogens sickening people this summer are the ones nobody has done that work on yet. Which is another way of saying the work is available.

The one number I would add.

The piece uses the federal figures for the lettuce outbreak — 10,930 illnesses, 454 hospitalizations and two deaths as of the August 20 update — and those are the correct federal figures. They are also a subset. They count the people investigators have been able to connect to the recalled lettuce. CDC’s national surveillancecounts 15,716 laboratory‑confirmed cases acquired in this country since May 1, with 11,841 more awaiting investigation, against 1,180 for the same stretch of last year. My own tally of what the fifty state health departments have published is past thirty‑one thousand. All three are floors, and none of them is the number of people who got sick.

I would trade the whole docket for a quiet summer, and I have said so in print often enough that nobody has to take my word for it. Until then, reporters who take the time to call four people and write the careful version instead of the loud one are how the public actually learns what is going on with its food. I have said the same thing about the epidemiologist who made CDC’s Cyclospora data readable when nobody was paying her to. Thank you, Mia de Graaf. The piece is worth your ten minutes.

As of Thursday, August 20, 2026, CDC counts 10,930 people sick in the federal Cyclospora outbreak traced to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico, at least 454 of them hospitalized, two dead, across seventeen states, with illness onsets running from June 14 through August 11. On its separate surveillance page the agency counts 15,716 laboratory-confirmed cases nationwide since May 1 and at least 11,841 more awaiting analysis. My own fifty-state tally, built from what each state health department publishes, stood at 31,889 that day. Those are the numbers this argument is supposed to be about.

Over roughly thirty-six hours this week, the senior food adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services[1] answered people asking about those numbers by going after the people instead. Renee Guilbault catalogued the replies with screenshots. I am not going to answer any of it in kind. I am going to set it out plainly, once, and then explain why it is a bad trade for the man making it.

Every one of those answers went to the person asking rather than to the question asked

Here is the record of the past two weeks in summary, as documented in Guilbault’s post and in his own public account.

DateWho was answeredWhat the reply contained
August 8-9The Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness, and reporters quoting itCalled it a fake foodborne-illness advocacy group funded by processed-food companies; posted separately that junk food companies are paying millions to spur the hysteria
August 20Renee Guilbault, who had replied with a citationTold her she had outed herself, plus a claim of fewer recalls this year; no source, no engagement with her data
August 21Dan PfeifferA personal insult; nothing responsive to what he asked
August 21Governor JB PritzkerA personal insult; nothing responsive to what he asked
August 20-22A member of Congress, a former Surgeon General, a CNN anchor, a physicianAn insult, an unrelated claim, or another posting of the same recall chart. The words used across the set include dumbass and idiot
August 21An FDA warning about the frozen blueberry recallA reply from the department’s own rapid-response account, amplified by the Secretary, headed FACT 1 and FACT 2, the first of which is the recall claim below and the second of which is about the 2024 election margin

Source: Renee Guilbault, The Informed Eater, August 22, 2026, which reproduces each reply as a screenshot, together with contemporaneous reporting. I have not independently retrieved every post; the screenshots and the accounts they came from are public and can be checked.

Six entries, and not one of them contains a case count, a hospitalization figure, an inspection date or a plan. That is a choice, and it is an old one. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote out thirty-eight tricks for winning an argument you are losing, and he put this one last, as the final resort: the moment you see you are being beaten, become personal and insulting. He was not recommending it. He called it the point at which a man abandons the contest of intellect and appeals to something else entirely.

It is not new, either, and the clearest case is the one that ought to embarrass him most. In July, speaking at a MAHA event at the Great American State Fair, he told an audience that Marion Nestle’s research had been bankrolled by the sugar and tobacco industries, which he said had funded her to argue that the base of the American diet should be carbohydrates. He posted separately that she was an architect of the 1990s Dietary Guidelines that produced an explosion of refined carbohydrates and ultraprocessed food. Tim Carman of the Washington Post took the charge to her, and she answered it in print. She sat on the 1995 Dietary Guidelines advisory committee as one member among many, and was not its architect. The rest of it is inverted. Marion Nestle has spent her career documenting who pays for nutrition research; she wrote the book that made industry funding of food science a public subject, and she still runs a weekly item on industry-funded studies. She also spent 1986 to 1988 as senior nutrition policy adviser at the department he now advises, where she edited the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. Her answer included the part he should have read first: she is not MAHA’s enemy, she supports pieces of its agenda, and she has been on record for years asking for coalitions around the objectives everybody shares. That is who he chose to accuse of being bought. A man who cannot tell an ally from an opponent is going to have a hard time finding either one when he needs them.

That is the cost, and it is not a cost to the people being insulted. It is a cost to the man posting. A government spokesman has exactly one asset, which is that when he states a fact, people provisionally believe him. Every insult spends a little of it, and every insult attached to a number invites the reader to check the number. People have now checked, and the number did not hold up.

The recall count does not measure whether food is safe, and the group that compiled the numbers says so in writing

The chart being posted says food recalls are at a multi-year low. The updated version of it now carries a citation, to the Get the Facts data team at Hearst, which used figures compiled by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund. That citation is the problem with the chart.

On August 16, updated August 21, PIRG’s consumer watchdog director Teresa Murray published a piece asking exactly this question: are we seeing more food recalls? Her answer is no, and her next sentence is that even if we were, it would not automatically mean our food is less safe. She writes that the annual number of recalls is not an indicator of whether food is safe.

The people who assembled the data say it does not measure what it is being used to measure. That is enough. I do not have to argue that recalls are up, and I am not going to, because the count would not prove my case either. It has been the wrong instrument in every administration I have watched, which is now thirty-three years of them.

Three datasets say 2026 is running flat, and they are counting three different things

There is no single national recall number. There are several, they are built on different universes of events, and they cannot be plotted against each other. Here is what each one actually counts.

SourceWhat it counts2026 to dateComparison
U.S. PIRG, Food for Thought 2026Announced recalls: the FDA and USDA actions that get a press release or public alertNot yet published for the full yearAbout 320 in 2025; 296 in 2024
RecallBenchEvery FDA food enforcement entry, Class I, II and III alike, plus FSIS recalls and public health alerts300 FDA events and 24 FSIS actions through August 12, or 324Annualizes to about 528
Sedgwick Recall IndexFood recall events in the first half of the calendar year266 FDA and 9 USDA in the first half of 2026270 FDA and 24 USDA in the first half of 2025

Sources: U.S. PIRG Education Fund, Food for Thought 2026; RecallBench 2026 statistics, retrieved August 22, 2026; Sedgwick Product Safety and Recall Index for the first half of 2026, as reported August 20, 2026. Arithmetic check on the annualization: August 12 is day 224 of 365, or 61.4 percent of the year; 324 divided by 0.614 is 528.

None of those rows says multi-year low. Two say flat. The gap between 320 and 528 is the difference between counting the recalls that got a press release and counting every recall that got classified, and a year-to-date bar cannot sit beside full-year bars, which is where the decline in that chart comes from. Guilbault built the annualized version and posted it in reply. The arithmetic took her an afternoon.

The last row of the table above is the one that ought to worry the department most, because it did not come from a staffer’s account. The claim in it, that recalls are at their lowest in over a decade, went out over an official one. Susan Mayne, who ran FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition for eight years and has been writing about this outbreak since July, checked it against the agency’s own public dashboard and found the number had been drawn across every category FDA regulates, drugs and devices and tobacco and veterinary products together with food, rather than food alone. A recall warning is not the place to run a numbers argument. People were being told that a product in their freezer might hurt them.

A recall is a notice sent after people are already sick, and most outbreaks never produce one

PIRG looked at all 28 foodborne illness outbreak investigations announced in 2025. Thirteen of them never identified even a food type. In four more, investigators named a food but never a brand. Recalls were announced in 11 of the 28. Whatever the total count of recalls is in a given year, the illnesses that never generate one are invisible in it.

Recalls are also, overwhelmingly, voluntary and company-initiated. Crediting an agency for a high recall count credits it for what companies did after the fact and crediting it for a low one credits it for silence. A recall is a lagging indicator triggered by illnesses that have already been counted. You cannot recall what nobody found.

The gap that produced this outbreak is an inspection gap, and it can be measured

The lettuce came from a plant in Guanajuato. GAO reported in 2025 that FDA averaged 917 foreign food facility inspections a year from fiscal 2018 through fiscal 2023, against an average of 8,353 domestic ones, and Congress wrote a schedule into the Food Safety Modernization Act that would have reached more than nineteen thousand foreign inspections a year by 2016. ProPublica reported last November that the foreign number has since fallen below two hundred, and that the cause was not a shortage of inspectors but the loss of most of the staff who booked their travel and processed their reimbursements.

Nobody at FDA decided to stop looking at that plant. No one was assigned to go. The investigators, the state epidemiologists and the traceback analysts who have worked this outbreak all summer have done it with what they were left, and they are not who I am arguing with. The plant was last inspected seven years before this outbreak, and the visit before that was in 2013, the year of the last Cyclospora outbreak traced to the same company and the same Mexican state.

Four things inside this administration’s own control would help more than any argument on X

First, put the Food Traceability Rule back on the schedule it had. It was published November 21, 2022, took effect January 20, 2023, and carried a compliance date of January 20, 2026, which was moved to July 20, 2028. Iceberg lettuce is on the food traceability list. The jalapeño peppers behind the Salmonella outbreak running alongside this one are on it too.

Second, restore the surveillance. FoodNet went from eight pathogens to two, and Cyclospora was among the six dropped. A parasite nobody is watching for is a parasite nobody finds until thirty thousand people are sick.

Third, rebuild the foreign inspection program, understanding that it is a travel and reimbursement problem as much as a headcount problem, and fixable this year.

Fourth, name Cyclospora in the pre-harvest agricultural water rule. The indicator organisms growers test for do not detect it, and the antimicrobials they use do not kill it. Testing for something else and calling the result clean is not a control.

Not one of those four requires Congress to act first, and not one of them requires anybody to lose an argument in public.

Nobody has to lose this argument for people to stop getting sick

I have spent a good part of this summer disagreeing with this administration’s food safety record, and I have written about this particular adviser before. None of that changes the arithmetic above, and none of it is a reason to answer an insult with one. The country is not served by a fight between a plaintiffs’ lawyer and a political appointee about who is arguing in bad faith.

Mr. Means, this part is for you. You have a job most people in food safety would take, with a Secretary who listens to you and a department that can move things I have spent thirty-three years asking for. The four items above are inside your reach. Nobody who works on food safety for a living is going to be talked out of the numbers by being called a name, and every time you post one you make it easier for the next reader to skip past a true thing you say. If you want to know what this outbreak actually did, I will introduce you to some of the families. An hour, no press, no reporters, nothing on the record. That offer has been open to every administration since 1993, and it is open to you.

Every correction that has to be issued costs more credibility than the original claim was worth. And the 10,930 people in the federal count, the 454 who were hospitalized and the two families in Michigan who buried someone are not a talking point on either side of this. They are the reason there is anything to talk about.

[1] Calley Means has been a senior adviser in the Office of the Secretary at HHS since November 2025, where he supports food and nutrition policy and works directly with Secretary Kennedy; HHS confirmed the appointment to The Hill. He came into the administration in March 2025 as a White House special government employee, a designation capped at 130 days, and left when that term expired in the fall. He co-authored the May 2025 MAHA report and the Make Our Children Healthy Again strategy that followed it, and he co-wrote the book Good Energy with his sister. Before government he co-founded the health-benefits company Truemed and worked as a consultant to food and pharmaceutical companies; Reuters has described him as a former food industry lobbyist. He has not held a food safety or public health position.

Saturday, August 22, 2026

This is my seventh Weekend Wrap-Up. Last Saturday this column was called On Tuesday They Said the Food Supply Was the Safest in the World and the Outbreak Was Contained. By Thursday Night the Government’s Own Outbreak Had Grown by Half. This week the message stayed the same and the arithmetic went the other way again. Three states cut how often they publish. Officials in two more said the worst had passed. On Friday two national outlets ran pieces reporting the outbreak may be tapering off. And then every count that moved this week moved up, one of my own readings turned out to be wrong, CDC added fourteen hundred people to the federal outbreak without adding a single state, and a sprout outbreak that was forty-one people in two states on Thursday was fifty-five people in fifteen states by Friday afternoon.

Tuesday’s confirmed count reached 15,716, and the backlog grew instead of clearing. CDC’s surveillance page now carries 15,716 laboratory-confirmed cases of Cyclospora acquired in this country since May 1, up from 13,895 a week earlier, with 828 hospitalizations and the same two deaths in Michigan. Forty-seven states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The number underneath it is the one I would watch: the pile of cases still under investigation went from 10,455 to 11,841. Confirmed rose by 1,821 while unconfirmed rose by 1,386, which means new arrivals outran the laboratories again. Combined, the federal count is 27,557 people.

A correction to something I published, and it is mine rather than anyone else’s. A week ago the unconfirmed pile had fallen for the first time all season, and I read that as the reporting lag finally clearing. I flagged at the time that one week is not a trend. One week later it grew by 1,386. It was not a trend. The drop was an artifact, the queue is deepening rather than emptying, and anybody who took comfort from my paragraph should take it back out.

The federal government has now told the public, in writing, that six clusters of this parasite have no explanation attached to them. CDC added a section to that same page headed Clusters of illness under investigation and pointed readers to FDA’s active investigation table, where six files carry 236 people between them and name no food at all. None of it is new to the table. What is new is that it now sits on a page a worried person might actually read.

Then on Thursday CDC added 1,449 people to the outbreak and did not add a single state. The Taylor Farms de Mexico lettuce outbreak now stands at 10,930 illnesses, at least 454 hospitalizations and two deaths across seventeen states, with onsets running June 14 through August 11, and the Fast Facts block says seventeen states, none new. That has not happened before in this investigation. Every prior update grew the map as well as the count, from five states to nine to fifteen to seventeen. FDA posted the same figures the same day and changed one sentence worth reading twice. On August 13 it had begun an onsite inspection at Taylor Farms de Mexico, the processor. It now says onsite inspections and sampling at iceberg lettuce growers in Mexico, plural, with international partners. The investigation has moved upstream from the plant to the fields, which is where a waterborne parasite reaches lettuce in the first place.

For the first time all summer, laboratory work ties these illnesses to one another. At the end of Thursday’s update sits a paragraph that was not there a week ago. Investigators are genotyping samples from sick people, and CDC says the parasites that caused these illnesses are genetically related, which it calls additional evidence that everyone in this outbreak got sick from the same source. Read it precisely, because it cuts both ways. It ties the patients to each other. It does not tie them to a head of lettuce, because there is no product isolate to compare against and there never was. What it does do is close off the argument that this summer is a great deal of unrelated cyclosporiasis piling up at once — which is the best case against the lettuce, and I had set that case out as well as I know how the day before. San Francisco showed within a day what the tool does: one resident’s infection was genetically associated with this outbreak, in a state where the recalled lettuce was never distributed.

CDC also deleted the paragraph that told readers where the lettuce went. The passage naming the distribution — at least thirty-one states, including Taco Bell locations and Marketside products at select Walmart stores — is gone from the consumer page, and the link to the recall notice went with it. The caption now says the outbreak was linked to that lettuce, past tense, where a week ago it said is. The tense is defensible; the best-by dates really have passed. The distribution list is a different matter. FDA still publishes both lists, so the information has not vanished from the government. It has come off the page a worried person is likeliest to land on, on the day the count rose by 1,449.

Seven in ten confirmed cases are now assigned to the lettuce, and two of every three people counted in this country are assigned to nothing. The 10,930 set against 15,716 confirmed is roughly seven in ten, where a week ago it was six. Against the combined federal figure it is four in ten. Against my own fifty-state count, which stood at 31,889 on Thursday and has since taken corrections of 177 in Illinois and 31 in Washington, it is about a third. Attribution here means a sick person told an interviewer what they ate, and not one state publishes its own cases split that way. New Hampshire is the exception: thirty-two of its sixty-nine cases are tied to recalled product, and the cluster behind them began with nine people who ate from a hospital cafeteria salad bar in Keene. A hospital can see illness in its own workforce and report it the same week. A grocery store cannot. And in Lee County, Florida, a nurse practitioner at a free clinic told a reporter on Thursday that her clinic is not testing anyone, because her patients are uninsured and the test runs into the hundreds of dollars. She has seen cases anyway, in patients and in her own staff, and none of them are in Florida’s count.

The jalapeño outbreak added eighty-six people and five states, and its epidemic curve runs into August. CDC moved that count for the first time in fourteen days: 431 sick in 32 states, 57 hospitalized, nobody dead, with Florida, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and West Virginia added. Minnesota and Colorado hold 247 of them between them. CDC also confirmed what its own published curve showed before its text caught up: illnesses ran from June 19 to August 2, not to July 20. Twenty-four people got sick on or after the day Chipotle switched suppliers, and five after QDOBA stopped serving jalapeños. I am not going to tell you what that tail means, because the interviews behind it have not been published. Roughly 164 grocery products have now been pulled across eight companies, the importer has still never published a recall notice, and the grower in Sinaloa has still never been named.

Thursday’s new sprout outbreak was a fifteen-state outbreak by Friday. Minnesota’s health and agriculture departments named alfalfa sprouts grown by Everything Sprouts of Minneapolis, sold under the Everything Sprouts and Calco brands, behind twenty-three illnesses there, with Wisconsin reporting seventeen more. On Friday CDC and FDA both posted: fifty-five people in fifteen states, four hospitalized, nobody dead, onsets running May 31 through August 8, and twenty-six of the thirty-four people interviewed had eaten alfalfa sprouts. The outbreak did not grow overnight. It was always this size, and two state health departments found it before the federal system did.

Read the pathogen line twice, because it is the whole story. Those fifty-five people are carrying Salmonella Agona and three separate serogroups of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli — O26:H11, O103:H25 and O168:H8 — and two of them are carrying one of each at the same time. A kitchen does not do that. A seed lot does. Sprout seed is grown in open fields, and whatever lands on it goes into a warm, wet, four-day germination that is very nearly an incubator by design. There is no kill step afterward, because the entire point of a sprout is that you eat it raw. We have been here before, with the same two states and the same vegetable: in 2016 an E. coli O157 outbreak traced to alfalfa sprouts from Jack & The Green Sprouts of River Falls, Wisconsin sickened eleven people across Minnesota and Wisconsin. Minnesota’s epidemiologists found that one and found this one, which is worth saying out loud in a summer spent criticizing the architecture. Sprouts have been linked to more than fifty outbreaks in this country since the mid-1990s. I do not eat them and will not feed them to my family, and I have never had to revise that.

The company recalled on Friday afternoon, and the notice lists no lot numbers. FDA said it had recommended a recall and that none had issued, and Food Safety News ran the story under a headline saying the company declined. Later that day Everything Sprouts posted a notice on its own website recalling alfalfa sprouts distributed since May 27. Read the document. It says the products subject to the recall include the following lot numbers, and then lists none. It says no illnesses have been reported to the company, in an outbreak of fifty-five people. It calls the company Everyday Sprouts, twice. It reaches Minnesota and Wisconsin, in a fifteen-state outbreak. And it arrives with FDA’s sample press release still stapled to the bottom of it, the specimen one about XYZ Inc. of Anywhere, Mississippi recalling five-ounce packages of Snackies. FDA had inspectors in that plant on August 19, and it had warned this company in March 2025 about a roof leaking onto exposed sprouts and promised to check the corrections at its next inspection. There was no next inspection. A recall here was never going to clear a shelf, because the product lasts days. What a recall produces is lot codes, a customer list, and notice down the chain to everyone who received it. None of that is in this document.

The produce industry’s own chief scientist told Congress this week to take an independent outbreak board seriously. De Ann Davis, senior vice president for science at Western Growers, published a piece on August 19 supporting Frank Yiannas’s proposed National Foodborne Outbreak Investigation Board, conditionally, and her diagnosis is the best sentence written on this subject all year: responsibility in the American food safety system is distributed and accountability is not. Her seven design questions mostly have no answers yet, because there is no bill. Thirteen congressional letters have gone out about this outbreak and not one of them asks for this. I answered her on Friday and named six people who could sit on such a board. I am not one of them, and neither is any other lawyer who bills an hour on these cases.

The lobbying record now has names in it. I spent Sunday and Monday in the disclosure database after the Guardian pulled the first filings. One association reported its work as support for the thirty-month compliance extension in its own words. A second named the shutdown bill by number in the quarter it passed. And a 2024 bill to strip the lot-code requirement out of the traceability rule was introduced by a member of the appropriations subcommittee that writes FDA’s money and cosponsored by that subcommittee’s ranking member. The bill died. Its language turned up in three appropriations cycles and became Section 780. The Senate’s own appropriators wrote the opposite instruction, and their language did not survive conference. Nobody has asked in public why.

FDA held its two-day Listeria meeting in College Park on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the docket is still open. I did not make it and filed written comments instead. The agency’s own background note says listeriosis incidence has not moved in more than a decade, against roughly 1,250 cases and 170 deaths a year, and not one of the seven questions it published asks what regulatory or enforcement change would move that line. Docket FDA-2026-N-7914 does not care whether you were in the auditorium, and a paragraph from somebody who has chased a persistent strain through a drain is worth more than another page from me.

The country has a nominee to run the FDA, and she will inherit all of this on her first day. The President announced the nomination of Heidi Overton on Wednesday. She is nominated and not confirmed — the Senate health committee still has to act, and Kyle Diamantas remains acting until it does. My prediction is a three-hour confirmation hearing with no question about lettuce. If I get one thing into her in-box it is not on any of my policy lists. Spend an hour with somebody it happened to. Every other item I have asked for costs money, rulemaking, or an act of Congress. That one costs a calendar entry.

We filed twice this week, in California and in Illinois. Whitney and Casey Hight sued Ramona Family Naturals Market and the Eben-Haezer’s Happy Hens egg ranch in San Diego County Superior Court. Twenty-one people are sick and seven have been hospitalized in an outbreak the county traced to house-made mayonnaise built on raw, unpasteurized shell eggs — which the California Retail Food Code forbids by name, mayonnaise included. The county has since named the farm and says the same Salmonella strain is turning up in people who never set foot in that market, and there is still no recall and no published list of the stores that received those eggs. Then on Friday we filed in the Northern District of Illinois for a Chicago librarian and his wife, the first case of this outbreak filed in that state and the sixth we have filed. He ate a Chalupa Supreme box meal on July 11 and ordered it through the app, so the purchase is in his bank records rather than his memory. CDC issued its health alert on July 14. He was in an emergency room on July 15. FDA named the lettuce on July 16 and named Taylor Farms de Mexico on July 17. Nobody tested him for the parasite for another nine days, and it came back positive on August 4, twenty-three days after he got sick.

On the recall ledger, the jalapeño chain kept unspooling a week after everybody stopped watching it. FDA posted Hardie’s Fresh Foods on Monday — five-pound bags of whole jalapeños sold at two Texas Costco warehouses, seven lot codes, a notice that never once mentions the outbreak that caused it. The company had announced it five days earlier. Salata Dressings of Houston pulled a jalapeño avocado dressing sold at Texas H-E-B stores. Neither appears on FDA’s own outbreak advisory, which is now several recalls and eighty-six illnesses behind FDA’s own recall page. As always, Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert is catching the ones the rest of us miss, and her weekly roundup is where I check my own.

One piece of housekeeping, and it is the most useful thing in this column if it reaches the right person. We are hiring. Marler Clark is looking for two people: an associate attorney with at least five years of litigation experience, and a paralegal with at least ten. There is more work than there are lawyers to do it. Everything above is the docket — six cases filed against Taco Bell, four franchise operators and Taylor Farms, the first jalapeño case, infant botulism against ByHeart and Nara Organics, Listeria out of Boar’s Head, E. coliO157:H7 from beef kofta and romaine, Salmonella from a Ramona egg ranch and a Lexington pie shop, and whatever those sprouts turn into.

Here is the part of the job nobody advertises. Clients find us; that has never been the hard part. Finding the defendant is. You will read FDA inspection reports and environmental assessments, USDA establishment records, whole genome sequencing and PulseNet clusters, epidemic curves built by state health departments and, this summer, the sanitation records of a Mexican municipality. That work happens before the complaint is filed, not in discovery. There is no billable hour requirement, no origination credit, and the firm carries the case costs. The other half of the practice is petitions, rulemaking comments, legislation and writing, and people here put their own names on that work. We would like you on Bainbridge Island rather than commuting to it — a few minutes up from the ferry terminal, thirty-five minutes across the water from Seattle — and we will help with the move. Having the right person matters more than the zip code. Competitive salary depending on experience. Write to me directly at bmarler@marlerclark.com and tell me why this work rather than any other.

That’s the week — a backlog that grew, fourteen hundred people added to a federal outbreak that did not add a state, the first laboratory evidence anyone has produced in three months, a paragraph about where the lettuce went quietly deleted, a jalapeño curve that ran two weeks past where it was supposed to stop, a sprout outbreak that went from two states to fifteen in a day and produced a recall notice with no lot numbers in it, and a nominee who gets all of it handed to her. Michigan had its smallest week of the outbreak on the same day CDC added 1,449 people to it. Both of those things are true at once. The season CDC defines closes on August 31. That is nine days. Check back next Saturday.

About Bill Marler

William “Bill” Marler has spent more than thirty years as a food safety lawyer and advocate—work that began with the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak and has never really stopped since. In the years that followed, he has represented victims in nearly every major foodborne illness outbreak in the United States. That case, and the movement it launched, is the subject of the book “Poisoned” and the Emmy Award–winning Netflix documentary of the same name. Bill’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker (“A Bug in the System”), the Seattle Times (“30 years after the deadly E. coli outbreak, a Seattle attorney still fights for food safety”), the Washington Post (“He helped make burgers safer. Now he’s fighting food poisoning again”), and many others.

Dozens of times a year, Bill speaks to industry, regulators, and universities across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, China, and Australia about a simple idea: outbreaks are preventable. He has testified before Congress on the Food Safety Modernization Act and teaches food safety at institutions including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He writes regularly about food litigation and food safety at Marler Blog, and in 2009 he founded Food Safety News, which he continues to publish.

Lisa Fletcher, Andrea Nejman and Nathan Aaron published a piece yesterday on the two infant formula botulism outbreaks — the 48 babies across 17 states sickened by ByHeart Whole Nutrition, the four more sickened by Nara Organics — and on what the FDA knew about the risk before either one happened. They gave me a few minutes in it. I would rather spend this post on them.

Understand what they walked into. By every measure a newsroom uses, this story is finished. CDC declared the ByHeart outbreak over on February 26, 2026. The recalls are done. Nobody died. That is the point where coverage stops, and it stopped. Back in May I put the whole complaint in a headline: botulism and infant formula had gone out of the news, but the babies and the families are still here. These three went and reported it anyway.

And they reported it, which is a different thing from writing it up. They asked Representative Rosa DeLauro whether she would support a congressional hearing on the outbreaks, and got her on the record saying she would look into it and that it was important to do. They got her explaining that a member in the minority cannot call a hearing but can hold briefings — and that when her office tried to arrange one, the agency was not helpful. That is news, and I had not seen it anywhere. They asked Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie whether he would move the Infant Formula Safety Modernization Act forward. His office did not respond. Then they went to the congressional record and established that as of August 14 the bill has gone to no markup and no floor vote since its April 29 hearing. That is four calls and a records check nobody else made, on a bill I have written to both the House and the Senate about.

They also got the part that matters most, which is a parent talking. Amy Mazziotti asked every doctor who came into her son’s room whether it was the formula, and was told there was no way, and said she felt as though she were being gaslit for asking. She was right. Months later ByHeart was recalled nationwide. I represent families in both of these outbreaks, and I will say what I have said for thirty years: the mother is usually right about what the child ate.

Her closing thought is better than anything I have managed to write on this since November. Every story about these babies ends by noting that nobody died, as if that settled it. As she put it, “just because they didn’t die doesn’t mean they’re OK.” Then she asked whether a baby has to die before this becomes important. I do not have an answer for her. Neither does the rule.

None of this is a first outing for these three. Spotlight on America is Sinclair’s national investigative unit; Fletcher is its national investigative correspondent, Nejman its national investigative producer, Aaron a video journalist. They spent a year on toxic heavy metals in baby food, won a National Press Club award for it, and two states passed testing laws afterward. This is a team that keeps showing up on what babies eat long after the cycle has left, which is why they were the ones still here to make the calls this week.

The line of mine they used is the one I care about most. I can count on one hand the number of times a government official has reached out to a parent, or asked a parent to come tell Congress what it was like to watch a child on a feeding tube. That has been my ask for three decades and I made it again in June, in writing, to the Secretary and to the Acting Commissioner. What Fletcher, Nejman and Aaron did here is a version of that same hour — they put a mother in front of a national audience and let her describe the week. A television crew did what the government has not done.

Meanwhile the substance has not moved an inch. Federal regulation still requires finished powdered formula to be tested for exactly two organisms, and Clostridium botulinum is not one of them. The FDA is still working the root cause of both outbreaks, three years after it named the organism in its own letter to industry. The bill that would close the gap sits where it sat in April. And 535 t-shirts, one for every member of Congress, go to the Hill in September.

My thanks to Lisa Fletcher, Andrea Nejman and Nathan Aaron, and to the editors who gave them the time and the airtime for a story with no fresh recall attached to it. Attention is the scarcest resource these families have. You spent some of it on them. Please keep going.

Their story is here.

Fifty-five people in fifteen states are sick with Salmonella Agona or one of three strains of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli after eating alfalfa sprouts grown by Everything Sprouts, LLC of Minneapolis and sold under the Everything Sprouts and Calco brands. Four have been hospitalized and no one has died. Illness onsets run May 31 through August 8, 2026. On Friday, hours after USA TODAY asked why there was still no recall, the company issued one. As of Saturday morning, August 22, that recall does not give a consumer a single thing she can act on.

Mary Walrath-Holdridge asked why there was no recall, and by Friday night there was one.

Credit where it belongs. Mary Walrath-Holdridge at USA TODAY spent Friday on the question that actually mattered in this outbreak, which was not the case count. It was why a company whose product had been named by two state health departments, by CDC and by FDA still had not recalled anything. Her piece went up at 5:38 p.m. Eastern on Friday, and it says plainly that as of August 21 there had been four hospitalizations and no recall.

She asked me why an outbreak carries four organisms at once. I told her it is unusual, but that when it happens it tends to happen in sprouts and in raw milk. The reason is structural and I gave her the short version: sprouts are a raw agricultural product grown outside, harvested and put into fifty-pound bags, and if the seed picks up contamination in the field, putting it in a warm wet environment to sprout is a perfect place for bacterial growth. Nothing between the field and the sandwich kills what arrived on the seed.

I also told her something that belongs next to every count in this outbreak. Two of the fifty-five are recorded as carrying both Salmonella and E. coli. That two is a floor, not a finding. When a stool sample is cultured, the lab is generally looking for a pathogen, not for every pathogen, and once something grows the work usually stops. Nobody goes back through the plate hunting for a second organism in a patient who already has an answer. The real number of people in this outbreak carrying more than one germ is almost certainly higher than two, and we will never know by how much.

She was asking the same thing I have been asking since Wednesday, and I have asked it about sprout growers before — in 2011, when an Idaho sprouter told a reporter she wanted concrete evidence before pulling product and most of it had probably been eaten anyway.

Late Friday, Everything Sprouts posted a two-page voluntary recall notice on its own website. Read it. It is the most revealing document to come out of this outbreak so far, and not for the reasons the company intended.

The notice says it covers certain lot numbers and then lists none.

The recall describes the affected product as Everything Sprouts alfalfa in a five-ounce plastic container with a lid, distributed from May 27 to the present, and then says the products subject to the recall include the following lot numbers. Nothing follows. The list is empty. There is no lot code, no best-by date, no product photograph and no UPC in the document.

The notice also says the product went to certain third-party distributors and to a number of retail grocery stores in Minnesota and Wisconsin. It does not name one distributor or one store. Sick people live in fifteen states, including Florida, Washington, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. A shopper in any of them reads this notice and learns nothing about whether the sprouts in her refrigerator are the sprouts in question.

The Calco brand is missing, and it is half of what people were told to look for.

FDA and CDC both told consumers not to eat, sell or serve alfalfa sprouts under the Calco and Everything Sprouts brands. Minnesota and Wisconsin named both brands in their releases on August 20. The recall names one. Calco Sprouts, a Minneapolis company founded in 1991 and now operating under Everything Sprouts, does not appear anywhere in the document.

The organisms are short a few names too. FDA identifies three STEC serotypes in this outbreak — O26:H11, O103:H25 and O168:H8 — plus Salmonella Agona. The recall notice names the first two serotypes and refers to Salmonella generically. A recall that describes less of the hazard than the federal advisory it was supposedly written to satisfy is not a recall that was written carefully.

The company says no illnesses have been reported to it, one sentence before saying agencies reported illnesses to it.

Two consecutive paragraphs. The first says that to date no reports of illness involving the product have been reported to the company. The second says the company became aware of reports of illnesses from federal and state agencies. Both sentences call the firm Everyday Sprouts, which is not its name. Fifty-five people are sick.

The notice adds that during this outbreak the company has tested its products daily and received no positive results. Sprouts have a shelf life measured in days. The outbreak was announced publicly on August 20 and the last illness onset FDA has is August 8. Daily testing that began after the announcement is testing this week’s product, and this week’s product is not what made anyone sick. A negative lot today says nothing about a lot in July, which is precisely why the lot codes matter and precisely why they are not in the document.

FDA’s blank sample press release is still attached at the bottom.

FDA publishes a model recall notice so that a firm in the worst week of its corporate life does not have to invent one. Everything Sprouts used it, which is fine. What is not fine is that the template is still in the file. The document ends with FDA’s sample, unaltered — a fictional XYZ Inc. of Anywhere, MS, recalling five-ounce packages of Snackies, lot number 666666, expiration date 12/12/99. Nobody deleted it before publishing. As far as I can tell from the public record, nobody at FDA read the notice before it went out either.

Which brings me to the other document that has not changed. FDA’s outbreak advisory, content current as of August 21, still says the agency has recommended that the company conduct a recall, and still says FDA is working to determine additional distribution information. The recall happened and the advisory does not reflect it. The one page a worried person is most likely to find still tells her a recall has been asked for, not issued. The March 2025 warning letter to this same facility ended the same way, with FDA saying it would evaluate the corrections at the next inspection. The next inspection was August 19, 2026, and it happened because people were in the hospital.

There is a third page that does not carry it either. FDA’s Recalls, Market Withdrawals and Safety Alerts list is where a shopper, a grocer or a reporter goes to find out what has been recalled. As of Saturday morning, content current as of August 21, Everything Sprouts is not on it. The ten most recent entries run back to August 17: a canned dog food recalled for metal fragments, a sourdough loaf with metal in it, two allergen notices, an IV solution, ice cream bars with glass, jalapeños. The dog food went up on August 21, the same day as the sprout recall, so this is not a case of the list running a day behind.

The page carries its own caveat that not all recalls are posted there. Fair enough as a general matter. Four organisms, fifty-five people, fifteen states, four hospitalizations and an ongoing federal advisory telling the country to throw the product away is not a general matter. A recall that appears on no government page, names no lot codes and identifies no customers exists in one place only — a PDF on the recalling company’s own website, which a person would have to already know to look for.

A recall is paperwork, and this paperwork does not do the work.

I will concede the shelf-life point before anyone makes it. Sprouts sold in July are gone. Nobody is going to find a contaminated clamshell in the back of the fridge from the week the outbreak peaked. That is not what a recall is for.

A real recall produces a record. Lot codes, so a distributor can match what it received. A customer list, so notification runs down the chain to every wholesaler, restaurant and grocer that took the product. An entry in FDA’s Recall Enterprise System and the weekly enforcement report, with a hazard classification attached to it. A press release that names the brands and the stores. Two years from now that record is what tells a court, a regulator and the next family what moved where, and when the company knew. A notice with no lot codes, no customer list, one brand out of two and a Gmail address as the point of contact produces none of it.

Fifteen states have sick people. Two states are named in the recall. That gap is the whole story, and it has not closed since Friday.

Questions people are asking this weekend

Is there a recall on Everything Sprouts and Calco alfalfa sprouts?

Yes, as of August 21, 2026, but a narrow one. Everything Sprouts, LLC issued a voluntary recall of Everything Sprouts alfalfa sprouts in five-ounce plastic containers with lids, distributed from May 27 onward to distributors and grocery stores in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The notice lists no lot numbers, does not mention the Calco brand, and as of August 22 does not appear on FDA’s recall list. FDA and CDC continue to tell consumers not to eat alfalfa sprouts under either brand.

What should I do if I have these sprouts in my refrigerator?

Throw them away or return them to the store, and do not eat them or feed them to anyone. Wash and sanitize any surface, container or drawer they touched, using hot soapy water or the dishwasher. Do not try to wash the sprouts themselves. Washing does not remove bacteria that grew inside a sprout, which is why every agency in this outbreak is saying discard rather than clean.

How many people are sick, and where?

Fifty-five, in fifteen states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota and Washington. Four have been hospitalized. Forty-six had E. coli, seven had Salmonella, and two are recorded as having had both — a floor, because a lab generally stops culturing once one pathogen grows. Of thirty-four people interviewed, twenty-six — seventy-six percent — reported eating alfalfa sprouts. Those are states of residence, not states where the sprouts were eaten, and the real number of sick people is higher than the confirmed count in every outbreak of this kind.

What symptoms should I watch for, and when?

STEC symptoms begin from a few days up to nine days after exposure: severe stomach cramps, diarrhea that is often bloody, and usually little or no fever. Salmonella usually shows up within twelve to seventy-two hours, with diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps. Call a doctor right away for bloody diarrhea, a fever above 102, diarrhea lasting more than three days, or signs of dehydration. In children, watch for decreased urination, unusual tiredness and loss of color in the cheeks and inside the lower eyelids — those can signal hemolytic uremic syndrome, a form of kidney failure that follows STEC infection.

San Diego County raised the Ramona Salmonella count to twenty-three confirmed and suspected cases on the afternoon of Friday, August 21, 2026, and for the first time broke the outbreak into its two halves: eighteen illnesses tied to the house-made mayonnaise the County calls Ramona Red Sauce, sold at Ramona Family Naturals Market, and five in people who got sick from eggs supplied by Happy Hens, the poultry ranch a few minutes up the road. Seven people have been hospitalized. The most recent case was detected on August 16. There has been no recall.

Credit where it is owed. Paul Sisson of the San Diego Union-Tribune has caught every turn in this outbreak, including the one the County did not announce — the quiet August 15 update that first put Happy Hens in the story. He got Friday’s new numbers, he got a straight answer out of Sacramento about a federal inspection, and he got a working scientist on the record. Most of what follows below comes from his reporting.

Five people got sick from the eggs, not from the sandwich.

That is the sentence that changes this outbreak, and it is the first time the County has quantified it. Since the July 28 bulletin the entire public story has been a small-town deli and its homemade mayonnaise. The County has now said that five of the twenty-three illnesses had nothing to do with that deli counter. Those five people bought eggs, took them home, and got sick.

Eighteen sick from one product at one address is a restaurant problem, and it is largely self-limiting once the restaurant stops using the ingredient, which the Market did. Five sick from eggs moving through ordinary retail is not self-limiting at all. Happy Hens supplies grocery stores across San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties and, by its owner’s own account, up into the Central Coast. Nobody has published a list of the stores that received those eggs. Nobody has asked a consumer to check a carton. I said this a week ago when the non-market cases were a single unexplained clause in a County update. They are now a number.

FDA inspected the farm, and no one will say what it found.

A California Department of Food and Agriculture spokesperson confirmed to the Union-Tribune on Friday afternoon that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspected Happy Hens after being notified of the outbreak and then declined to discuss an active investigation. That is the first confirmation that any federal agency has set foot on this farm, and it arrived four weeks into the outbreak by way of a reporter’s email rather than an agency announcement.

It also answers a question I had left open. FDA’s shell egg rule, 21 C.F.R. part 118, reaches producers with three thousand or more laying hens whose eggs are not all sent for treatment and who do not sell everything direct to consumers. Happy Hens has been described — on its own website, and by its owner on camera — as running about fourteen thousand birds into grocery accounts. FDA showing up is the agency treating this as a covered operation.

An inspection generates a record. There is an establishment inspection report. There may be a Form 483. There may be environmental samples and there may be sequencing. Under part 118 and under California’s own egg rule, 3 CCR 1350, the farm is supposed to have a written Salmonella Enteritidis prevention plan, environmental monitoring of its houses, egg testing when a house tests positive, and three years of records. None of that is public. On Monday we will file Freedom of Information Act and Public Records Act requests with FDA, CDFA, the California Department of Public Health, and San Diego County to find out what exists. I will publish what comes back.

As to my day job.

Fredric Gordon and I filed on Whitney Hight’s behalf this week in San Diego Superior Court, against both the Market and the egg ranch. She bought the chicken salad on June 25 and ate it at home. She was ill on the evening of June 27, and she stayed ill. She tested positive for Salmonella on July 3 after an emergency department visit in Escondido, severely dehydrated. She missed two weeks of work and went back still sick because the household could not afford otherwise. She spent the Fourth of July in bed.

There is nothing exotic about that. It is what this illness does to a healthy thirty-six-year-old, and it is why the count matters: for every case a health department confirms, roughly thirty-eight more go uncounted.

California does not let a deli put raw shell eggs in mayonnaise.

Health and Safety Code section 114012 requires a food facility to substitute pasteurized eggs for raw shell eggs in foods that are not thoroughly cooked, and it names mayonnaise expressly. The only lawful way around it is a written variance from the enforcement agency — in Ramona, that is the County’s Department of Environmental Health and Quality. The complaint alleges no such variance was ever issued. A violation of the Retail Food Code is a misdemeanor.

A UC Davis professor just explained why a fully compliant ranch can still make people sick.

Maurice Pitesky, who teaches poultry health and food safety epidemiology at UC Davis, told the Union-Tribune that no prevention program is perfect and that eggs from a fully compliant ranch can still carry Salmonella, which is precisely why people should not eat uncooked egg products. Treating a prevention plan as the entire answer, he said, is the equivalent of “putting all your food safety eggs in one basket.”

He is right, and I want to be honest about which way that cuts. It is the best short explanation anyone has given for why the Market’s decision to build mayonnaise on raw shell eggs was the failure that made this outbreak possible, whatever the ranch did or did not do. It is also a fair caution against assuming the farm was negligent before the records are in. Our allegation that Happy Hens fell short of proper Salmonella prevention is an inference from what is known so far, and I said as much to Sisson: it is an allegation we need discovery on. Somehow this outbreak happened, and we need to get to the root cause.

The farm has now denied it four times, and the eggs are still for sale.

Happy Hens denied the link on Instagram, then on camera to Fox 5, then to NBC 7, and now in a video post saying the farm followed Salmonella prevention protocols. Co-owner Chloe Nevarez has said the County never took a sample from her farm, that nine of the sick shared the same genetic fingerprint but that this proves nothing about her hens, and that she is confident enough in her eggs to drink them raw.

I understand why a family that has raised chickens for decades reacts that way. I have watched a lot of companies go through this week. But the absence of a farm swab is not the defense it sounds like. SalmonellaEnteritidis is shed intermittently and gets into the egg internally, through the hen, so a clean barn in August says very little about eggs laid in June — and the eggs in question were eaten weeks ago. Whole genome sequencing that ties patients to each other, plus exposure histories, plus traceback to one supplier, is the proof package in a foodborne outbreak. 

Which brings me back to where this started. There are twenty-three people sick. Five of them never went near the deli. The most recent illness was detected five days ago. There is no recall, no consumer warning, and no published list of the stores that got the eggs. In December, when the state found Salmonella in eggs at a Sacramento-area ranch, the California Department of Public Health issued its own press release and the firm recalled. Here, four weeks in, the County’s public action is still a reminder to retailers about egg storage and grading, and the state agencies have said nothing at all under their own names.

Questions people are asking.

Are Happy Hens eggs recalled? No. As of August 21, 2026 there has been no recall of Happy Hens eggs and no public list of the stores that received them.

I bought eggs at a store, not at the Ramona deli. Could I be part of this? The County says five of the twenty-three cases are in people who ate the ranch’s eggs rather than the Market’s mayonnaise. If you have had diarrhea, fever or abdominal cramps after eating eggs, call your doctor and report it to San Diego County Environmental Health and Quality at (858) 505-6814.

Does cooking eggs fix this? Yes. Salmonella can be inside an intact, clean egg. Cooking until both the yolk and the white are firm kills it. Raw and lightly cooked egg preparations — house mayonnaise, aioli, Caesar dressing, hollandaise — do not.