Contamination by Design: How an industrial food system has driven the cyclospora outbreak
Regulatory neglect, corporate consolidation, and poor labor conditions contribute to the spread of a diarrhea-causing parasite
Cyclospora is a usually-rare foodborne parasite — spread by produce contaminated with human feces — with annual U.S cases normally numbering in the hundreds. This summer, that figure has surged past 10,000 in Michigan alone, with thousands more cases reported across the nation. Through trace-back investigations, the FDA has identified chopped iceberg lettuce shipped by a Taylor Farms processing plant previously linked to a 2013 cyclospora outbreak that sickened more than 600 people as the source of the primary outbreak. The story, however, of how this disease spread so far is more complicated than one processing plant, or even just one outbreak — although Taylor Farms has been named in many before. Ultimately, it implicates the very way produce is grown in North America, the consolidation of companies that process and ship it, politicians from both parties, and the regime of artificially cheap farmworker labor upon which it all rests.
As of July 28, The CDC has received reports of 6,707 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases of cyclospora and is investigating another 11,500. As of July 31, Michigan — the state at the center of the outbreak — has reported 10,773 cases, well over double the number of confirmed cases the CDC has identified in the state. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gotlieb estimates that the true number of cyclospora cases is 10 or 20 times the amount currently being reported, making it the largest documented cyclospora outbreak in history.
While the majority of confirmed cases are linked to Taylor Farm’s iceberg lettuce, the FDA is currently investigating two other ongoing cyclospora outbreaks. The initial evidence suggests multiple sources and multiple waves of contaminated produce. This was also the case in 2013, when what initially appeared to be one outbreak resolved into at least two caused by distinct produce and producers.
Federal cuts and weakened regulation make our food less safe
Admittedly, the outbreak has been poorly handled by severely under-resourced and overworked public health agencies. Under the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC identifies and tracks foodborne outbreaks by analyzing illness data, while the FDA traces contaminated foods through the supply chain and inspects the farms and facilities involved. According to Congressman Josh Gottheimer, since the beginning of Trump’s second term, the CDC has fired more than 2,800 people — roughly a quarter of its staff — including more than 70% of the team responsible for tracking cyclospora and other pathogens. It has also lost $5.78 billion in canceled grants, deeply affecting the state and local health departments on the front lines of this outbreak which rely on the CDC for most of their funding. In the same period, the FDA has fired more than 4,300 people, including 170 in the Office of Inspections and Investigations. In 2024, that office had only 443 food safety inspectors for 36,600 facilities that it estimates would take 1,500 inspectors to properly cover.
These cuts are matched by similar actions across the Trump administration which undermine the larger infrastructure of foodborne pathogen research and monitoring. This includes a planned relocation of a USDA research center in Maryland which studies cyclospora — a widely condemned move which the staff union says is meant to push out experienced scientists and will disrupt ongoing studies — as well as a decision to remove cyclospora tracking from FoodNet, the CDC system which reports on and monitors national trends in foodborne pathogens. Collectively, these actions represent a systemic undermining of public agencies’ ability to both prevent and investigate outbreaks, as well as their ability to study and better understand pathogens like cyclospora.
These cuts add up to a regulatory system less able to effectively do its job. An immediate consequence of this diminished capacity has been a slow and, at times, contradictory federal response. Most notably, on July 18 the FDA announced that iceberg lettuce sourced from Taylor Farms’ plant in Doctor Mora, Mexico had tested positive for cyclospora, before retracting the test as a false positive the next day. Not only was the FDA’s initial announcement hasty and irregular, but their mistake resulted in conflicting messaging between federal agencies and Taylor Farms, who claimed that the FDA apologized for the false positive. It also opened the door for claims that the investigation was being politically manipulated given Taylor Farm’s political donations to MAGA PACs, plus calls and a visit by their lobbyists to the White House at the start of the outbreak. In response, the FDA posted on X that they had never apologized to Taylor Farms, and that epidemiological tracing still established Taylor Farm’s plant as the source of the outbreak.
Further complicating the narrative, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has rejected the conclusion that the outbreak began in Mexico after tests conducted by Mexican government agencies of produce and water sources at the processing plant and its supplying farms came back negative. However, cyclospora is notoriously hard to test for, due to both characteristics of the pathogen and the fact that testing only begins after the highly perishable contaminated produce has already been shipped and consumed. Most investigations are resolved through tracebacks, not positive tests.
The outbreak has resulted in anxiety in Doctor Mora and the wider lettuce-growing region of Guanajuato, where no cases of cyclospora linked to the outbreak have been reported. Taylor Farms’ processing plant (now temporarily closed) is known as the town’s most important employer, and the region’s lettuce growers are deeply integrated into U.S supply chains. Taylor Farms itself is a California-based company, which routes Guanajuato-grown lettuce through its Doctor Mora plant for export to the U.S. market. Despite the company’s origins in the U.S., Trump has threatened major tariffs on Mexico over the cyclospora outbreak. Such a tariff could threaten Guanajuato’s growers, many of whom farm under contract with U.S produce corporations for export to the States. Understanding how this multinational production system evolved in hand with an increasingly consolidated produce industry is crucial to understanding how contaminated produce from what was likely a very small number of fields ended up sickening so many consumers across the United States.
Scaling production and shipping disease: corporate consolidation in the food system allows contamination to spread further
The corporations which dominate the contemporary produce market all grow across multiple countries and predominately rely on a large number of contracted growers in each area. Taylor Farms, founded in California in 1995 but with operations that now span North America and Western Europe, is no exception. Through a series of targeted acquisitions which vertically integrated its supply chain across international borders, Taylor Farms is now one of the largest salad producers in North America and books approximately $7 billion in annual revenue. It only grows approximately a quarter of the salad it ships, relying instead on contracted growers across its broad geography.
So why did Taylor Farms expand so quickly, so far? To meet year-round demand, and capture economies of scale. The most lucrative contracts in produce are with large retail and food-service chains like Walmart, Taco Bell, and Target (all of which source from Taylor Farms). However, locking in these high-volume contracts takes being able to provide produce year-round. Since produce is highly perishable, unlike wheat or soy, year-round demand requires year-round production.
Meeting demand means stringing together multiple harvests across distinct growing regions, since no one location can provide the necessary quantity of produce year-round due to inherent limits of soil health, yields, and climate. With lettuce, Yuma, Arizona and the Imperial Valley of Southern California lead production in the winter, complemented by parts of Florida, Guanajuato, and Baja California. As temperatures increase in the spring, Arizona, Florida, Baja, and the Imperial Valley are replaced by harvests in Central California, while Guanajuato’s more temperate year-round climate allows it to extend harvests into late spring. California’s Salinas Valley takes over in the summer, complemented by some harvest in Guanajuato, before tailing off in the early fall when price peaks and supply wanes. By November, lettuce returns to Yuma and the cycle repeats. Throughout it all, lower-cost Mexican production fills key gaps in the U.S growing calendar, giving U.S consumers year-round access to lettuce. The same cross-border production model has enabled the largest grower-shippers to achieve unprecedented scale and profitability.
Pulling off this seasonal rotation is logistically complex and capital-intensive, requiring expensive investment in the cold chains that cool and transport the perishable produce to customers. As a consequence, the produce production model favors vertically integrated grower-shippers able to minimize costs by capturing economies of scale through aggressive expansion and acquisitions. The C4 ratio — the sum market share of an industry’s four largest companies, used to assess market concentration — of North American fresh-cut salads is 54%, with Taylor Farms alone accounting for 11.2%. This high C4 indicates an oligopolistic market and reveals that even if Taylor Farms is ultimately found innocent of this outbreak, the corporate culprit is likely one of a small handful of other companies.
To maximize returns, these companies aggregate and process harvests from multiple farms in a few central production and distribution hubs, before shipping across the U.S. This process, where contaminated produce from potentially just one field was mixed into thousands of fresh-cut salad bags, is likely how the outbreak has affected so many people, while the scale of the relatively uncompetitive distribution market resulted in it reaching so many states. In this cyclospora outbreak, the scale and concentration of the contemporary produce market has become a public health hazard.
In the United States, money translates to political power, and the produce industry has used that to kill food safety regulation and monitoring across administrations. The Food Traceability Rule passed by Congress and scheduled to be implemented at the start of this year would have enabled a much quicker and surgical public health response but was delayed to 2028 following coordinated industry lobbying by the Global Cold Chain Alliance, the Food Industry Association, and the National Grocers Association. In 2024, regulations requiring the testing of irrigation water for pathogens like cyclospora were replaced by what is essentially an honor system. During the Obama administration, fierce lobbying by the United Fresh Produce Association (now the International Fresh Produce Association) killed the Microbiological Data Program. This was a cheap and effective program run by the USDA from 2001 to 2012 for about $5 million a year, which pulled and tested samples of high-risk produce. In its last two years alone, this trip-wire triggered 23 product recalls.
In sum, the way that this outbreak has spread through a concentrated production and distribution network that has steadily eroded federal safeguards indicates a systemic problem of a few larger corporations controlling market governance itself, with the ability to cut costs and get rich at peoples’ expense.
Exploitative and unsanitary conditions for workers put us all at risk
One particularly poignant and relevant place where this is visible is in the working conditions for farmworkers. Since cyclospora is spread through human feces, sanitation issues in the fields and plants are food safety issues for consumers. Despite this, farmworkers routinely report missing or unsanitary portable toilets, and pressure by supervisors to skip bathroom breaks or relieve themselves in ditches near the fields they work in.
Unsanitary working conditions are a well-established problem in the agricultural industry at large, including in repeated allegations made by the Teamsters union representing Taylor Farms plant workers in California. However, a recent viral Instagram post by the daughter of Raul Fernandez, a former Head of Sanitation for Taylor Farms in Arizona allegedly fired for resisting cuts to sanitation, has renewed attention on how farmworkers’ degrading working condition have contributed to the current crisis. The post alleges that Taylor Farms fails to provide bathrooms to its farmworkers, resulting in human waste contaminating produce, while naming how agribusiness relies on the legal vulnerabilities of predominately undocumented farmworkers to silence dissent. Moreover, even when bathrooms are available during harvest, farmworkers are paid in piece-rate — a fixed payment for every crate picked — to maximize efficiency and volume. This means that any time not spent picking is money lost for workers whose wages are already drastically insufficient to meet costs of living, and turns the long run down the field to a dirty portable toilet into an unattractive economic hit. In short, while depressing the working conditions and wages of farmworkers may bolster corporate profits, it puts everyone else at risk.
The largest outbreak of cyclospora in recorded history is due to an immensely concentrated industry whose production and distribution networks span the continent. Their market and political power have resulted in a system governed largely by the industry itself, where the lack of meaningful federal enforcement has enabled systemic cost-cutting in sanitation, traceability, and working conditions. Preventing future outbreaks of this scale requires not only restoring funding to our public health infrastructure, and implementing the Food Traceability Rule, irrigation water testing requirements, and the Microbiological Data Program. It will also take more systemic changes to the market structure itself, including the enforcement of anti-trust regulations and labor protections. There’s no time to waste, since warming climates and torrential weather tied to climate change means that outbreaks like this are only more likely to occur in the future.
