{"id":805,"date":"2026-07-23T20:37:04","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T20:37:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=805"},"modified":"2026-07-23T20:37:04","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T20:37:04","slug":"so-is-the-lettuce-bad-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=805","title":{"rendered":"So is the lettuce bad or not?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What caused the ongoing outbreak of cyclospora, the diarrhea-causing parasite currently spreading across the United States? Michigan officials have been saying for weeks that they believed the outbreak may be linked to bagged salad or salad kits. What we were waiting to learn was the specific brands and specific products in question.<\/p>\n

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And late last week, it looked like we finally had the answer \u2014 but then things quickly got cloudy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On July 16, the Washington Post reported, citing anonymous sources, that the outbreak had been linked to shredded iceberg lettuce supplied to Taco Bell by Taylor Farms. A day later, Taylor Farms said it was withdrawing products from US stores and restaurants based on information from the FDA.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But then on July 19, per NBC News, the FDA said that there had been a false positive for cyclospora when testing a sample of Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce; Taylor Farms said in its own statement that the FDA had \u201capologized\u201d for the mix-up. The next day, the company and the federal government were stuck in a semantic argument: Per NOTUS, the FDA insisted it did not \u201cofficially apologize\u201d to Taylor Farms but \u201cexplain[ed] factually the issues\u201d with the false positive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So where does that leave us right now? Officials still believe that Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce was the source of the Michigan outbreak. But whether those are the only products driving the outbreak remains unclear, with almost every state now reporting at least one cyclospora case in 2026. And on Thursday afternoon, the FDA announced that it was tracking a second outbreak linked to other unspecific products, though details were otherwise scarce.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Any outbreak of food-borne illness requires careful public communication. Officials need to tell people how to avoid contaminated food without scaring them away from eating fresh fruits and vegetables altogether.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But instead, many Americans have been left wondering what, exactly, they\u2019re supposed to do. As one frustrated Reddit user put it: \u201cSo is the damn lettuce bad or not????\u201d (If you need some advice on what foods are safe and what foods to be cautious about, we have a story for you.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It may sound like a funny question, but it\u2019s a profoundly serious one. The problem isn\u2019t just that people are confused about their lettuce. The Trump administration\u2019s handling of the cyclospora outbreak \u2014 from its conflicting public messages to accusations of political favoritism \u2014 has left many Americans even more confused about whether they can trust anything they\u2019re hearing from the government. That\u2019s a dangerous place to be during any public health emergency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The cyclospora outbreak has become a communications nightmare<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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We are approaching 10,000 cyclosporiasis cases across the US this year: Michigan alone has recorded 7,664 as of this morning, Ohio has seen more than 1,200, and more than 40 states have now reported at least one case in 2026. The country usually sees a few hundred cases at most in a given year. Cyclosporiasis, the disease caused by the cyclospora parasite, leads to what public health experts describe as \u201cwatery\u201d and \u201cfrequently explosive\u201d diarrhea. While it isn\u2019t typically life-threatening, it can cause serious complications: 160 people have been hospitalized in Michigan since the outbreak began.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And so for those of us who very much hope to eat fresh produce but do not <\/em>want diarrhea, there\u2019s a bit of urgency to figure out where the cyclospora is coming from. Food-borne illness investigations are already inherently difficult because of how globalized our food supply has become: Produce can travel all over the country and the world before it comes to your grocery shelf, and the process of government health workers interviewing the people who get sick and cross-checking to identify the shared foods that they might have in common is laborious.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Once investigators find a source, the information has to be shared clearly and responsibly. That is where the Trump administration has tripped up this week.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump \u2014 and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in particular \u2014 came into office criticizing the public health establishment. They accused officials of misleading the public about the novel coronavirus and the vaccines developed to fight it, while failing to convey the nuances of the pandemic. But now, as they grapple with the incomplete picture of the cyclospora emergency, they are making many of the same mistakes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThey\u2019re very similar problems, even if on the outside, they don\u2019t look quite the same,\u201d said Michael Mackert, director of the Center for Health Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. \u201cThe underlying commonality is very much that we are dealing with imperfect information all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In any outbreak, some uncertainty is to be expected. Investigators have struggled to identify the source of earlier cyclosporiasis outbreaks too. And the FDA maintains that the likely source of the outbreak is Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce, based on the information they have gathered from sick patients and other sources, no matter the false positive result that has sparked so much confusion.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe epidemiological evidence is so strong that the lack of a positive test is almost meaningless,\u201d said Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the mistake that the Trump administration made was in sharing preliminary results and then having to issue a seemingly contradictory statement shortly afterward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cFDA should have waited for confirmation of the presumptive results before going public,\u201d Diez-Gonzalez said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The larger stakes of the Trump administration\u2019s poor communication<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Investigations like these are hard enough \u2014 but when you add in the public health funding cuts of the past 18 months and the casual and widespread corruption characteristic of the Trump administration, trust in the government\u2019s public health apparatus has sunk even lower.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s created just the conditions for conspiracies to bloom. \u201cUnfortunately our FDA is compromised,\u201d wrote one top commenter on Reddit. \u201cI would not trust what comes out of it during this administration.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Several news outlets and influential social media accounts noted that Taylor Farms had donated $1 million to Trump\u2019s MAGA super PAC and, in the middle of the controversy, received a private White House meeting. According to the New York Times, Taylor Farm officials used that meeting to dispute the findings that their products were responsible for the outbreak \u2014 and shortly thereafter, the FDA made its \u201cfalse positive\u201d announcement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The administration insists that their decision-making is being guided by science, but even the appearance of impropriety has become a common theme in the press coverage. The broader uncertainty and distrust may help to explain why it\u2019s not only Taco Bell and Taylor Farms taking a hit right now: According to Market Watch, Chipotle and the fast-casual salad chain Chopt have also seen a decline in traffic in recent weeks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Public health requires public confidence. Perceived influence from special interests is a problem, even if the interactions didn\u2019t alter the FDA or CDC\u2019s actions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Kennedy, who helms our government\u2019s health department, should understand this well: His Make America Healthy Again movement made restoring public trust a central part of its message while accusing the existing public health establishment as being in league with special interests.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The cyclospora outbreak has revealed how difficult that is to do in practice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In trying to communicate nuanced information during an active outbreak \u2014 while consulting interested parties like Taylor Farms itself \u2014 the administration has instead fueled doubts about the credibility of its messaging<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even before cyclospora turned eating salad into a leap of faith, Trump had a poor track record: His administration has slashed CDC staff, brought on vaccine skeptics to set vaccine policy, and clashed with the scientific establishment on a number of high-profile issues, like the time Trump held a televised press conference to argue a disproven theory that Tylenol can cause autism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cUnfortunately, this is another example of a missed opportunity to establish credible and trusted communications to prepare the public to understand the real risks from the pathogen and confidence in the food safety and information from the FDA,\u201d Scott Ratzan, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, told me. \u201cFaith in our institutions continues to erode. We could do better.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We are lucky cyclospora is not a deadly disease. Next time, the stakes for these miscues could be much higher.<\/p>\n

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    The US cyclospora outbreak is getting worse \u2014 and it\u2019s not being helped by poor communications from the Trump administration on the Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce testing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":804,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nSo is the lettuce bad or not? - American Living Report<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=805\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"So is the lettuce bad or not? - American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The US cyclospora outbreak is getting worse \u2014 and it\u2019s not being helped by poor communications from the Trump administration on the Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce testing.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=805\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"American Living Report\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-23T20:37:04+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=805#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=805\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/7b970e3bc484fe2e26860a4380d70de8\"},\"headline\":\"So is the lettuce bad or not?\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-23T20:37:04+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=805\"},\"wordCount\":1423,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=805#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/7eab733d57bd56e8f9c3867939e8904b.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Interesting\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=805#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=805\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanlivingreport.com\\\/?p=805\",\"name\":\"So is the lettuce bad or not? 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