Tamar Haspel makes the case against lettuce in the Washington Post this morning. It makes people sick, it takes land and water, we throw away roughly as much as we eat, and it delivers almost nothing nutritionally. Her illness numbers are real, and I went and found the paper behind them. Her conclusion is where I part company, and I say that as the lawyer who has spent nearly thirty years suing companies that sold contaminated lettuce, and who does not eat bagged salad himself.

It is a serious column, and it asks a question the produce business would rather not hear asked out loud, which is whether a food this fragile earns its place at all. I am not going to pretend that is unfair. More than thirty-two thousand Americans have been counted sick this summer with a parasite that arrived on shredded iceberg.

Her illness figures come from a real paper, and they are the top of a range.

The 2024 analysis is Yang and Scharff, Foodborne Illnesses from Leafy Greens in the United States: Attribution, Burden, and Cost, in the Journal of Food Protection. It attributes to leafy greens as many as 2,307,558 illnesses a year in this country at a cost of as much as $5.278 billion, and it finds that lettuce accounts for up to 75.7 percent of those illnesses and 70 percent of the cost. Run the multiplication and you land near 1.75 million illnesses and $3.7 billion, which is where the column’s figures come from. Two honest notes. Those are upper bounds. The paper’s own ninety percent interval runs from 1,077,815 to 4,075,642 illnesses and from $3.23 billion to $8.221 billion, so the lettuce share at the bottom of the range is closer to 820,000 illnesses and $2.3 billion. And the paper is two years old. It does not include this summer.

This summer is worse than the paper that already put lettuce at the top.

As of its most recent update, CDC counts 10,930 people sick in the multistate Cyclospora outbreak traced to iceberg lettuce grown in central 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, with data through August 17, the agency counts 15,716 laboratory-confirmed cases acquired in this country since May 1, at least 11,841 more awaiting confirmation, and cases in forty-seven states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, against 1,180 for the same stretch of last year. National hospitalizations on that page now stand at 828, up eighty-eight in a single week. My own fifty-state tally, built from what each health department publishes, was 32,135 on Sunday night. Nobody needs to convince me that lettuce can hurt people. I have spent the summer counting the people it hurt.

She is right that there is no kill step, and that is the honest structural fact underneath all of it.

Everything that makes lettuce worth eating is what makes it dangerous. It reaches the table raw, so nothing along the way kills what is riding on it. Washing is not a kill step. Ortega and Sanchez wrote in Clinical Microbiology Reviews that washing and sanitizing may reduce the risk but cannot be expected to eliminate it, and have been demonstrated not to remove oocysts completely. FDA says in its own voice that chlorine and other common antimicrobial treatments are not effective against this parasite. The National Restaurant Association tells its own members that washing produce under running water cannot guarantee removal of it. I wrote before IAFP this year that there is no kill step for Cyclospora, and that is still the shortest true sentence anyone can write about this food. It is also why I skip the bag.

The pathogen is not a property of the plant. It is a property of the water.

Cyclospora cayetanensis lives only in people. It reaches a lettuce field exactly one way, which is human waste getting into the irrigation water or onto the ground. That is not something lettuce does. It is something we do upstream of lettuce, and the record says so every time. FDA’s advisory changed this month from an onsite inspection at the processing plant to onsite inspections at iceberg lettuce growers in Mexico, which is the agency saying in public that the problem sits upstream of the plant. The 2018 romaine outbreak was traced to an irrigation canal in the Yuma growing region. In 2020 FDA found Cyclospora in a canal serving an Indiana farm that supplied a salad processor, though the agency said its genetic typing could not establish that the canal parasite caused the illnesses. The same Guanajuato facility sat at the center of a Cyclospora outbreak in 2013, and FDA’s environmental assessment then told the firm to determine whether the parasite was a reasonably likely hazard in that growing region and to re-evaluate the wash step. Stop eating lettuce tomorrow and every one of those water sources is still there, still running onto something somebody eats.

Quitting the category is what a traceability failure already does, and we watched it happen in July.

The column proposes as policy what this market already did to itself by accident. After the recall, Chopt traffic fell about 12 percent and weekly spending at Sweetgreen dropped roughly ten percentage points against last year, and neither chain has been linked to anything. Paul Sellew, who grows lettuce in the eastern United States and has no connection to Mexico or to Taylor Farms, watched his sales fall by double digits and said his customers were motivated by fear. NielsenIQ measured fresh lettuce unit sales down 9 percent in a single week. Not one of those declines made a single person safer. That is the mechanism worth understanding. When nobody can say which lot, people stop buying the category, and the loss lands on growers who did nothing wrong while the contaminated water stays exactly where it was. It is also the best economic argument there is for the traceability rule Congress passed and then pushed to 2028.

The cost-benefit only works if you price one side of it.

The column prices carefully what lettuce costs us and never prices what fixing it would cost. Those numbers exist, and they are small. USDA’s Economic Research Service puts the annual national cost of cyclosporiasis at $5.3 million, a figure resting on a case estimate from 2011 that nobody has updated. Read what that model actually assumes: about twenty Cyclospora hospitalizations a year in the entire country, eleven of them domestically acquired and foodborne. CDC counted 828 this season. The Microbiological Data Program, the produce-testing program killed in 2012, ran about $4.5 million a year. FDA costed the traceability delay itself in the Federal Register at 90 FR 38084 on August 7, 2025, and the arithmetic is the agency’s own: forgone public health benefit of $91 million to $112 million a year against $54 million to $73 million in industry savings, which means the delay destroys roughly $37 million to $39 million a year more than it saves. Set all of that next to Spalding and Sexton in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, who put the total societal loss from the single November 2018 romaine incident at $276 million to $343 million, and whose own conclusion was that the answer is mandatory standards and better traceability. One of my degrees is in economics, and it does not take one to read that ledger. Outbreaks are expensive. Preventing them is cheap.

Adding E. coli and Listeria to the Ledger Makes the Case for Fixing It, Not for Quitting It.

The obvious objection to everything above is that I have priced one parasite. Fold in the pathogens that made lettuce famous and the numbers do change, though not in the direction the column needs. Start with the correction. The $3.7 billion is already the multi-pathogen figure. Yang and Scharff built it out of norovirus, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli both O157:H7 and non-O157, Campylobacter, nontyphoidal Salmonella and the rest. E. coli and Listeria do not stack on top of that number. They are most of it. Cyclospora is the pathogen barely in it. What changes when you go pathogen by pathogen is severity, and the spread is enormous.

Per-case costs from USDA’s Economic Research Service, Cost Estimates of Foodborne Illnesses, in 2023 dollars, read August 2026. Lettuce attribution from Yang and Scharff and from CDC. Check the arithmetic: 10,930 times $464.63 is $5,078,406, which is 2.03 times what ERS assigns to a single case of listeriosis.

Read the two ends of that column together. The entire federal Cyclospora outbreak this summer, all 10,930 people and 454 of them hospitalized, comes to roughly $5.1 million at the government’s own per-case figure. Two cases of listeriosis match it. That is why a cost-benefit run on this parasite by itself always loses. It is the highest-volume and lowest-priced pathogen on the page, and no program aimed at it will ever clear a threshold built that way.

The intervention set does not change with the pathogen, and that is the whole answer. Treating agricultural water, traceability, restored surveillance and a water rule that measures something other than generic E. coliwork on all of them at once. FDA’s arithmetic on the traceability delay was never a Cyclospora calculation in the first place; it covers every food on the traceability list and every pathogen that rides in on them. Add a pathogen to the benefit side and the cost side does not move. Each one folded in improves the ratio for fixing this, and not one of them improves the ratio for quitting.

E. coli is the strongest card the other side holds, and it deserves saying plainly. The Interagency Food Safety Analytics Collaboration attributes more than 85 percent of E. coli O157 illnesses to vegetable row crops and beef, with row crops significantly higher than every other food category. FDA maintains a standing Leafy Greens STEC Action Plan whose stated purpose is breaking a cycle of reoccurring outbreaks. The same O157 strain has come back since 2016. A commodity that produces the same genotype for a decade is not having bad luck.

And the answer to it is the same water. USDA researchers found Listeria monocytogenes in 43 percent of environmental samples taken in a watershed connected to a major leafy green growing region. Yuma in 2018 was a canal. Guanajuato was sewage in 2013 and again this summer. Three pathogens, one failure mode, which is an argument that gets stronger with E. coli and Listeria in it rather than weaker.

One asymmetry belongs here honestly. Listeria in packaged salad is a plant problem rather than a field problem. The 2015 outbreak traced to a processor whose own records showed Listeria in the facility across nineteen months. That is the one place the record runs the column’s way, and it is exactly why I do not eat the bag. The answer to harborage in a plant is environmental monitoring and enforcement, not abstinence.

I already skip the bagged salad, and I still will not tell anyone to give up vegetables.

My list of foods I do not eat has been on this blog for decades, and prewashed, precut produce is number four on it. I told the Washington Post the same thing in December. That is a personal calculation made with information most people do not have, and it is not public health advice. Most Americans already fall short of the vegetable recommendation, and the last thing anyone in this field should want is a country that is afraid of produce. The column concedes the point itself, that the salad on the table is partly what keeps the second helping of pasta off it. People who give up salad do not switch to lentils.

The column closes on a choice between a solar-powered home and explosive diarrhea. That is a false choice, and both halves are available. Treat the agricultural water. Name Cyclospora in the water rule instead of scoring that water with a bacterial indicator that cannot see it. Restore the surveillance that tells us how many people are sick. Turn on the traceability rule that is already law, so the next recall can name a lot instead of a vegetable. Do that and my docket empties, which has been the point since 1993. Nobody has to give up a salad to get there.

Want to Put Us Out of Business? Come Help Us Try.

Marler Clark has been suing the companies that poison people since 1993 — since a nine-year-old girl named Brianne Kiner nearly died from a hamburger. Sixteen years later it was Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor paralyzed by a hamburger, whose case put the grinding of American beef on the front page of The New York Times and won Michael Moss a Pulitzer Prize. Thirty-plus years later we are still the only law firm in the country that does nothing but foodborne illness — tens of thousands of clients and over $850 million recovered — and there is more work than there are lawyers to do it. The names on the other side are ones you already know: Jack in the Box, Cargill, Dole, Nestlé, Walmart, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Nebraska Beef, Yum Brands, and this year Taylor Farms, Taco Bell and Boar’s Head.

As I write this, on August 19, 2026: a Cyclospora outbreak the fifty state health departments now count at 31,521 people and rising. The federal government called it 1,947 in nine states until it changed what qualifies as a case in August; its own number is now 9,481 in seventeen states, 398 hospitalized, two dead. Michigan by itself reports 13,909 cases — more than the federal government counts for the entire seventeen-state outbreak. We have five cases filed against Taco Bell, four different franchise operators and Taylor Farms, and more than two hundred other people in twenty-six states have retained us to find out how they were poisoned. Salmonella Javiana in jalapeños grown in Sinaloa — 431 sick in 32 states, Chipotle and QDOBA — which Minnesota epidemiologists and a company traceback found before it ever reached FDA’s outbreak table; a month later the grower still has not been named and the recall of what it sold has spread to more than 160 grocery products. Infant botulism litigation against ByHeart and Nara Organics. Listeria out of Boar’s Head. E. coli O157:H7 from beef kofta and from romaine. Salmonella from nineteen million recalled eggs and from a Lexington pie shop. E. coli O145 in frozen blueberries. Vibrio from raw seafood in Queens. Read a month of marlerblog.com. Clients in need find us; that has never been the hard part.

Finding the defendant is. Nobody hands you one in a foodborne case. 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 and rainfall records of a Mexican municipality where the lettuce was grown and the traceback on a lot of peppers out of Sinaloa. That work gets done before the complaint is filed, not in discovery. You will also have the Outbreak Database, which this office built and still maintains — decades of outbreaks, searchable, and no other firm in the country has it. Spanish is a real plus.

And half of this job is not litigation at all. E. coli O157:H7 became an adulterant in American beef in 1994; six more strains followed because we petitioned USDA to make them so. We helped pass FSMA in 2011, petitioned — so far without success — to have outbreak strains of Salmonella declared adulterants in 2019, and pushed hepatitis A vaccination for food workers in 2020. This year alone: an infant formula bill in the House, a food safety bill in the Senate, the Stop Foodborne Illness petition pending at FDA asking it to tell the public where recalled food went, comment letters on the traceability rule Congress delayed to 2028, and a standing demand that CDC count Cyclospora again. I publish Food Safety News, I have written over 6,000 posts on Marler Blog since 2004, I speak all over the world, and I teach food safety at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. You will do this too — including writing here under your own name, where reporters will read it. Within a few years it will be you the conference invites, the health department calls and the reporter quotes; our lawyers speak to industry groups, public health audiences and university classes, and that platform is handed over, not loaned. Work out of this office has been cited in more than a thousand media reports. We also correct in public: when a poultry veterinarian wrote in last month to tell me a post of mine was wrong, we ran the correction louder than the original. Being right matters less here than getting it right. Cases fix one company; the rest fixes the industry.

If you want to know what that adds up to, read the testimonials page on billmarler.com and pay attention to who is on it: a former FDA food safety czar, a former USDA food safety official, the retired head of the Produce Marketing Association. Michael Pollan wrote that the federal watchdog on food safety is asleep at the switch and we are what is left. One of the lawyers who defended the other side in the Jack in the Box cases became my law partner. You will spend your career arguing with the food industry, and some of the people you argue with will end up thanking you for it.

We are looking for an associate with at least five years of litigation experience — personal injury, product liability, med-mal, or complex tort — who is ready to run cases, not just paper. We are a handful of lawyers, not a floor of them: you will carry your own docket from the start.

Here is what you will not do here. There is no billable hour requirement and no origination credit to chase — the clients find us, and the firm carries the cost of every case out of its own pocket until it resolves. There is no committee, no partner standing between you and the person who decides, and no waiting your turn: when you need an answer you walk down the hall and get one. And there is no volume. We turn down cases every week that we could not do right, because a file nobody has time for is worse than no file at all.

Our office is on Bainbridge Island, and the honest truth is that we want you here — living on the island, not commuting to it. We are a few minutes’ walk up from the ferry terminal, thirty-five minutes across the water from downtown Seattle, in a town where you can walk to work, walk to lunch, and walk home. Most people who make the move do not move back. But the right lawyer matters more to us than the right zip code: if you are elsewhere in Puget Sound, or willing to relocate, and can be here most days, we should talk, and we will help the right person get here. 

What you’ll actually do: file in federal and state courts across the country, write the settlement demand letters that resolve most of our cases before anyone sees a courtroom — the medical chronology, the liability analysis, the damages model, all of it yours — take and defend depositions of plant managers and epidemiologists, work up hemolytic uremic syndrome, Listeria meningitis and Salmonella reactive arthritis cases with the best experts in the field, sit with families in hospital rooms, and try cases. The docket is national; you will be on airplanes. It has been international as well — outbreaks in Europe, Asia and Africa. You will be trusted early and often.

Many of our clients are children, and on those cases the last thing you do is the hardest. A settlement for a child has to be approved by a judge, cleared of Medicaid, Medicare, ERISA and sometimes federal military liens, and structured — now and then into a special needs trust — so the money is still there decades later, when the kidney an outbreak took finally has to be replaced. If you have never done a minor’s compromise, you will.

What you need: licensed and in good standing somewhere, admissible pro hac vice everywhere else — Washington admission is not required; real deposition experience; the writing chops to draft a complaint that reporters quote; and the stomach for what an outbreak does to a child. A science background is a bonus, not a requirement — we’ll teach you the microbiology.

What we offer: Competitive salary depending on experience, plus bonus; medical, dental and vision; 401(k) with match; paid vacation and holidays; bar dues and CLE; and cases that end up in The New York Times, in front of Congress, and in Poisoned, the Netflix documentary about this work — watch it before you apply. Also: a commute that involves a ferry or no ferry at all, and a firm that goes home for a safer dinner because of you.

One last thing, and it is the whole thing. Nobody here treats this as a practice area. Everyone here can name the child whose case they will never forget. That is why they stay. A client wrote to us that I came to the hospital while their son was there, and that somebody from this office was in touch every step after; that somebody is going to be you as often as it is me. I am not looking for a lawyer who wants a job. I am looking for one who cannot look away from it and wants to spend the next thirty years making a difference.

The job is open now. Resume, writing sample and a short note to bmarler@marlerclark.com — in the note, pick any case or outbreak off marlerblog.com and tell me what you would do with it first. The rest of it is public too: marlerclark.com and billmarler.com. No recruiters. Equal opportunity employer.

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