As of August 19, 2026, 431 people in 32 states have been confirmed sick with Salmonella Javiana traced to fresh jalapeño peppers grown in Sinaloa, Mexico and imported by Coast Citrus Distributors. Fifty-seven have been hospitalized. No one has died. Illnesses began between June 19 and August 2, 2026, and the outbreak has been linked to Mexican-style restaurants including Chipotle Mexican Grill and QDOBA.

CDC updated its outbreak page today, adding 86 cases and 21 hospitalizations at once, along with five states that had not appeared before: Florida, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Here is where the 431 sick people live.

Where sick people lived. Source: CDC, August 19, 2026.

The state-by-state numbers below come from the data published with CDC’s locations page, downloaded August 19, 2026.

StateCasesStateCasesStateCases
Minnesota129Wyoming7Virginia2
Colorado118Indiana6West Virginia2
Illinois33Nebraska6Arkansas1
Georgia28Michigan5California1
Kansas14New Mexico4Florida1
Wisconsin12Texas4Kentucky1
Oklahoma9North Carolina3Louisiana1
Missouri8Ohio3New Jersey1
Montana8Alabama2Utah1
South Carolina8North Dakota2Washington1
Tennessee8Pennsylvania2  

Two states account for 57 percent of the outbreak. Minnesota reports 129 cases and Colorado 118 — 247 between them, or 57 percent of every confirmed illness in the country. Illinois is next at 33, then Georgia at 28. Twenty of the thirty-two states report fewer than ten cases apiece, and eight report exactly one.

The epidemic curve runs from June 19 to August 2, and peaks on July 5.

Illnesses by date of onset. Source: CDC, August 19, 2026.

The first person got sick on June 19. The curve climbs through the last week of June, peaks on July 5 at 35 illnesses in a single day, and stays above twenty a day for most of the following week. Between June 28 and July 12 — fifteen days — 332 of the 431 people in this outbreak got sick. That is 77 percent of the whole thing inside a two-week window, and the crest of it sits on the Fourth of July holiday, which is when a fast-casual burrito line does its heaviest volume of the summer.

CDC publishes that curve as a picture, not as numbers. Here is the daily series read off it, day by day.

Onset dateCasesOnset dateCasesOnset dateCases
June 191July 430July 195
June 201July 535July 201
June 210July 627July 214
June 220July 719July 223
June 230July 824July 231
June 241July 924July 242
June 252July 1025July 254
June 265July 1120July 262
June 274July 1223July 271
June 2810July 1314July 281
June 2913July 1410July 292
June 3013July 1513July 300
July 120July 1610July 311
July 223July 173August 11
July 326July 186August 21

Daily illness onsets counted from CDC’s published epidemic curve, August 19, 2026. The 45 daily values sum to 431, matching CDC’s reported total.

Twenty-four people got sick on or after July 20 — after the first chain pulled the peppers. Look at the right-hand tail, because it does not stop where the earlier reporting said it stopped. Twenty-four people in this outbreak had illness onsets on or after July 20. Illnesses continued through the last week of July, and the curve carries three more days after that: one case on July 31, one on August 1, and one on August 2.

Chipotle switched jalapeño suppliers for affected restaurants beginning July 20, and QDOBA stopped using jalapeños entirely on July 28. Five people in this outbreak had onsets after July 28. Salmonella has an incubation period running from about six hours to six days, so those illnesses trace back to meals eaten in the last days of July — after both chains had acted.

I am not going to tell you what that tail means, because CDC has not published the interviews behind it and I do not know. It could be people who ate contaminated product held in a freezer or a walk-in somewhere downstream of the chains. It could be product that moved through a distributor nobody has traced yet. It could be a handful of cases related by sequence but not by that box of peppers. What I will say is that a curve running to August 2 is a different document than a curve ending July 20, and it is the first hard evidence that this outbreak did not switch off when the recall was announced.

Ninety-three percent of the people interviewed ate at a Mexican-style restaurant. Of 191 people interviewed, 177 reported eating at a Mexican-style restaurant in the week before they got sick, with meal dates from June 14 through July 14. Investigators identified 27 illness clusters at Chipotle Mexican Grill and QDOBA locations across seven states, and the ingredients people reported most often were jalapeño peppers, red onion, cilantro and avocado. FDA’s traceback ran those meals back to a single common grower in Sinaloa that supplies Coast Citrus.

Fifty-seven people have been hospitalized. Twenty-one of those hospitalizations arrived with today’s update. Salmonella Javiana is not an unusually aggressive serotype, and most people who get it ride it out at home for four to seven days — which is what makes a hospitalization count this high, in an outbreak this size, worth paying attention to.

The recall now covers roughly 164 products across eight companies. Taylor Fresh Foods (Taylor Farms) pulled twenty grocery products on August 9. Whole Foods Market recalled forty-three items its own departments had made. NatureBest Precut & Produce pulled eighteen pico de gallos, diced jalapeños and stuffed mushrooms sold in Texas and Louisiana under its own label and H-E-B’s. Albertsons Companies has published twice, covering sixty-three store-made items. Salata Dressings recalled a jalapeño avocado dressing sold at Texas H-E-B stores. Hardie’s Fresh Foods recalled five-pound bags of whole jalapeños sold at two Texas Costco warehouses. USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service issued a public health alert covering eighteen more meat and poultry items. Every one of those companies bought a contaminated ingredient from someone upstream and told the public about it.

The grower in Sinaloa has still never been named. Coast Citrus Distributors has still never published a recall notice of its own. Everybody downstream has put their name on paper. The two companies closest to the peppers have not.

What to do if you think this was your illness. The practical step now is a diagnosis, not a refrigerator sweep — nearly all the best-by dates on the recalled products have run out. If you ate at a Mexican-style restaurant in June or July and had days of diarrhea, fever and cramping, ask your doctor for a stool culture, and ask that the isolate go to the state public health laboratory for whole genome sequencing. That test is the only thing that turns a bad week into a case that counts. It is also why 431 is a floor and not a ceiling: most Salmonella infections in this country are never diagnosed at all, and CDC says so on its own page.

We filed the first lawsuit in this outbreak against Coast Citrus on August 14, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois, for a woman who ate at a Springfield Chipotle in late June and spent three days in the hospital. We sued the importer alone, because the peppers arrived in every kitchen downstream already contaminated. Eighty-six more people were added to this outbreak today. Somebody grew those peppers, and we still do not know who.

There is a serious argument circulating that the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history was not caused by shredded iceberg lettuce from central Mexico. It is not a fringe argument. It is being made by the largest produce trade association in the country, by a respected emeritus scientist, and it rests on real peer-reviewed literature. Today I am going to make that case as well as I know how, and every link is here so you can check it against the sources rather than against me. Tomorrow, I will tell you why I think it is wrong.

One disclosure first. My firm represents people sickened in this outbreak and we have filed cases naming Taylor Farms entities as defendants. Everything below is public either way. You should know where I sit before you read a word of it.

No product sample has ever been confirmed positive. The single positive FDA announced in July was retracted the next day as a laboratory error, and FDA said there were no confirmed positive product results as of July 19. Taylor Farms says on its own information hub that FDA still reported none as of August 13, and that it has sampled extensively in central Mexico without a positive. Whatever else is true, nobody has put this parasite on this lettuce in a laboratory.

The attribution is thinner than the headlines suggest. FDA’s outbreak advisory defines the outbreak as people who reported exposure to processed iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico served or purchased at various locations, including people who previously reported eating at Taco Bell. That is a self-reported answer in an interview. It covers 9,481 people against 15,716 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases — roughly six in ten of the confirmed, and under a third of the fifty-state floor of more than thirty-one thousand. Michigan, which holds nearly half of everything, interviewed more than 2,900 people and reported that many of them never ate lettuce at a restaurant chain or other food establishment at all.

The instrument may be steering the answer. This is the strongest part and it deserves to be understood rather than dismissed. In its comment on the federal docket for the Cyclospora hypothesis-generating questionnaire, the International Fresh Produce Association pointed out that CDC states in its own Federal Register notice that molecular typing methods for this parasite cannot independently identify genetically linked clusters. CDC’s deputy division director told The Hill the same thing: whole genome sequencing is not available for Cyclospora, so investigators fall back on targeted genotyping, useful for detection but slower and less precise. If the genetics cannot define the cluster, the interview does the work, and the interview has no water module. Nobody is alleging bad faith. The claim is that a system can converge on a wrong answer with everyone in it acting honestly, which is a harder claim to refute and a fairer one to make.

The underlying science is not invented. Cyclospora has been recovered from municipal wastewater in the United States, where conventional treatment removes oocysts only partially. A 2023 review by Chacin-Bonilla and Santin — Santin is at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service — argues for possible foci of endemicity in developed countries, particularly where sanitation is compromised. FDA’s own endemic-region footnote on its produce fact sheet lists Puerto Rico, a United States jurisdiction. This is not industry science. It is the literature.

And the argument now names a place. IFPA’s consumer page points to municipal sewage overflows in the greater Detroit and Toledo region, to drinking water and wells, and to recreational water in Lake Erie and the bodies of water around it, together with documented rainfall and combined sewer overflow activity in parts of the affected region in mid-June. Trevor Suslow, a consultant and emeritus professor at UC Cooperative Extension, went further in the California Farm Bureau this week, saying it is possible and even likely the outbreak did not come from produce at all. That same article discloses that he has consulted for Taylor Farms and visited the implicated Mexico facility last month, which you should weigh the way you weigh my disclosure above.

And here is the part I concede outright. The lettuce does not explain everything. CDC now says on its surveillance page that it is investigating multiple clusters, at least six of which have no confirmed source, and FDA has had six separate open investigations with only the lettuce one carrying an identified vehicle. North Carolina, now past nine hundred cases, says its increase does not appear to be associated with the Taco Bell outbreak and that parsley and cilantro come up repeatedly — while also conceding that many of its cases reported neither, which suggests more than one source. Anyone who tells you one salad ingredient accounts for thirty-one thousand people is not describing this summer.

Give IFPA its due on one more thing, because the careless version of the criticism loses. Its consumer page now says explicitly that for the confirmed subcluster, FDA’s traceback points to an imported product from central Mexico, a different pathway from the domestic water exposure it has raised as a question for the remaining clusters. They have scoped the water hypothesis to the cases nobody can explain, and they have not claimed it explains the recall. I wrote about that filing when it landed and I want the narrowing on the record before I argue with any of it.

That is the case. Made honestly, it is not stupid and it is not dishonest, and the people making it include scientists whose work I have cited approvingly for years. It deserves an answer on the merits rather than a sneer. Tomorrow it gets one, and I will start with the question I think ends it: how a contaminated American water supply reaches forty-seven states in a single summer, and where 236,192 cases of recalled lettuce actually went.

CDC Now Counts 15,716 Confirmed Cyclospora Cases and 828 Hospitalizations. The Backlog Went Up, Not Down. And the Agency Now Says It Is Investigating at Least Six Other Clusters It Cannot Explain.

CDC updated its cyclosporiasis surveillance page today with data current through August 17, and there is more in it than a new set of numbers. The page itself changed. Three things were added and three were quietly taken away, and one of the additions is the agency saying out loud something it has not said before.

Since May 1 there are now 15,716 laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis acquired in the United States, up from 13,895 a week ago. Hospitalizations are at 828, up from 740. Two deaths, both in Michigan, unchanged. Forty-seven states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Another 1,681 people got sick abroad and brought it home, with 61 of them hospitalized.

A question worth setting beside that number is how many of the 15,716 anyone has actually tied to Taylor Farms. The answer is 9,481, the figure CDC carries on its outbreak page, which is roughly six in ten of the confirmed cases, about a third of the combined federal count, and under a third of my fifty-state total. CDC defines this outbreak as people who reported exposure to Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce, including those who reported eating at Taco Bell. That is an interview, not a laboratory. Not one state publishes a breakdown of its own cases by attribution. Michigan, which has interviewed more than 2,900 sick people, reports that many of them never ate at Taco Bell, at another chain, or at any food establishment at all.

The one place in the country where that question got a real answer is New Hampshire. In July the state health department tied a cluster of illnesses to recalled Taylor Farms lettuce served on the salad bar at the Cheshire Medical Center cafeteria in Keene. It began at nine confirmed cases, with Dartmouth Health identifying sixteen people exposed, ten of them hospital employees. By early August the state was reporting sixty-nine cases and thirty-two of them tied to the recalled product, in a state that normally sees between two and nine cases in a year. That is the highest attribution rate anywhere, and New Hampshire is still the only state to have named a Taylor Farms product at a specific place that is not a Taco Bell. The reason is not that the lettuce behaved differently in Keene. A hospital can see illness in its own workforce and report it the same week. A grocery store cannot. The same product reached food service businesses in thirty-one states, and New Hampshire’s own health department says other restaurants and cafeterias in the state received it. It has never named one of them.

Here is the addition that matters most. CDC put a new section on the page headed Clusters of illness under investigation, and in it the agency states that beyond the multistate outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce, it and FDA are investigating at least six other clusters for which sources have not been confirmed. It points readers to FDA’s active investigation table and says that if sources are identified and there is something for consumers to do, it will issue outbreak notices then.

What is new is not the six clusters. What is new is that CDC has now put them on a consumer-facing page instead of leaving them in a regulatory table that almost nobody reads. That is a real improvement in transparency. It also means the federal government has now told the public, in its own words, that six groups of Americans have this parasite, and nobody can say where they got it.

My own fifty-state tally, built from what each state publishes rather than from what CDC confirms, stands at 31,342. A week ago, that number ran 6,173 ahead of the federal combined count. Today it runs 3,785 ahead. The gap is closing, which is what should happen, and it is closing because Atlanta is catching up rather than because the states are slowing down.

None of these is the number of people who got sick. Most people with cyclosporiasis never get tested, because the routine stool exam does not find this parasite unless somebody asks for it by name, and because diarrhea that comes and goes for a month often never reaches a doctor at all. The standard estimate of that gap comes from Scallan and colleagues, Foodborne Illness Acquired in the United States, Major Pathogens, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2011, which puts the underdiagnosis multiplier for Cyclospora at 83.1. Applied to 15,716 confirmed cases, that is roughly 1,306,000 people. The estimate carries wide margins, and it is not a headcount. I use it because the alternative is to let the confirmed number stand as though it were the answer.

The season closes on August 31. Illnesses are still starting, the backlog is growing again, and the federal government has just confirmed in writing that six clusters of this parasite have no explanation attached to them. That is where things actually stand, and it is on a public web page that anyone can read.

On June 25 I sent a letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. It had nothing to do with lettuce. It was about two outbreaks of infant botulism traced to powdered formula — forty-eight babies in seventeen states in the first one, every one of them hospitalized, and four more infants in the second. The Secretary had convened the formula chief executives around a table twice. As far as the public record shows, not one parent of a hospitalized baby had been in a room with him. Before your next roundtable with industry, I wrote, give the families one.

Seven weeks have gone by. As far as I can tell, it has not happened.

I am asking again, and this time about a parasite. CDC counts 13,895 laboratory-confirmed cases of Cyclospora acquired in this country since May, with at least another ten thousand still under investigation. Add up what the state health departments have published and the floor is above twenty-eight thousand. At least 688 people have been hospitalized. Two are dead in Michigan.

It is easy to hear this as a request for sympathy and it is not one. It is an argument about information. Duration and consequence come out of a case count before it ever reaches a desk of a Secretary of Health and Human Services, and a unit of one is silent about whether it meant a bad weekend or eleven weeks. An hour in a room puts back exactly what the briefing binder takes out.

My best example is a man I sued. Dave Theno was brought into Jack in the Box in 1993 to fix what had killed four children, and he stayed sixteen years. I deposed him and I did not go easy on him. Somewhere in all of that he got to know the family of Lauren Beth Rudolph, who was six and who was the first of the four to die, and for the rest of his life he carried her photograph in his wallet. He would take it out in meetings when he was explaining why he wanted something expensive done. Lauren is who we are protecting, he would say. Lauren, and the children she represents, is who I report to.

Dave changed that company and then changed an industry, and he did not do it because of a regulation or a verdict or a line in a report. He did it because he knew a child’s face. He drowned off Lanai in 2017, swimming with his grandson. I spoke at his memorial, which is not something a plaintiffs’ lawyer expects to be asked to do for a man he cross-examined, and I have missed him every year since. What I would give to have him in one of these rooms now.

In one week in 2009. I sat with a family in South Carolina whose daughter was in kidney failure from E. coli O157:H7 she got from cookie dough. She lived. Then I got on a plane to Ohio.

John Strike was a veteran and a grandfather. On April 11, 2009 he ate a cheeseburger at the VFW post in North Olmsted and three days later he was bleeding internally and headed for kidney failure and most of a month in a hospital bed. What he did not know, and what nobody could have told him, was that he had already passed it to his granddaughter when she visited him in the hospital. Abby Fenstermaker was seven. She went into the hospital on May 11, and her parents took her off life support on May 17. She was their only daughter, and my clients were her parents and the grandfather who was still recovering from the hamburger that killed her.

The Food Safety and Inspection Service announced the recall of ninety-five thousand eight hundred ninety-eight pounds of Valley Meats ground beef on May 21, 2009. Abby had been dead four days.

I have never gotten those two rooms out of my head, and I have never once looked at a case count the same way since. That is the entire reason I am writing this.

I am not the only person who has been through that hour, and the best account of it I have read this year was written by somebody not agreeing with me. In May, Kathleen Gillin published a response to one of my pieces. Twenty years ago, her nine-year-old daughter Rylee nearly died from E. coli O157:H7 in spinach and still lives with what it did. Kathleen now serves as the public member of the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement board. A few years after that agreement was formed, its leadership invited families harmed by foodborne illness out to California to meet growers, walk the fields and see the practices. Her words for what happened next were that it changed her perspective. She met the people doing the work — field crews, packing crews, auditors, family farm owners — and came away seeing an industry that had been altered by a tragedy it understood in human terms.

She and I do not agree about the leafy greens record. She thinks I give the industry too little credit for twenty years of reform, and she said so plainly. However, we agree completely about the hour.

Notice the direction that hour ran. The industry brought the families to the growers. Two decades later, nobody has brought the families to the government.

Nobody should write a rule because of one family. The hour is not a substitute for the surveillance data; it is a correction to a known distortion in it, applied to the person who has to decide what the data means and how urgently to act on it. Read the numbers, then meet one of them.

This is exactly what plaintiffs’ lawyers do for a living. It is. I have been putting families in front of juries since 1993, and I am not going to pretend I discovered the effect by accident. That is precisely how I know what an hour does.

And if officials should meet the sick, should they also meet the grower who plowed a crop under this summer, and the farmworker who lost the season with it? Yes. All. I have written about those losses and I meant it. An hour with a family in Michigan and an hour on a ranch in Salinas would leave a person better equipped than either one alone.

What I am asking for is smaller than it sounds, and it is worth saying exactly what it is not. It is not a press availability. It is not a family asked to testify, or to perform, or to be photographed on a stage next to somebody who needs the picture. Private. No cameras. No agenda beyond listening. Stop Foodborne Illness has been doing this work for decades and could arrange it inside a week; the walls of their offices carry photographs of the children who did not survive, which tells you they do not need to be taught how to handle it.

The ask is three hours, total, from three people. An hour for the acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs, who told the country last week that it should feel confident about produce. An hour for the new Director of CDC, sworn in six days ago into the largest Cyclospora outbreak this country has ever recorded. An hour for the Secretary, who has now been asked twice.

I have published fifteen things this government could do about this parasite and four I would do first. Every one of them costs money, or rulemaking, or an act of Congress, or all three. This meeting costs a calendar entry. It is the only item I have ever put on a list that requires nothing from anyone except the willingness to be in a room and hear something you would rather not hear.

It is hard. That is the honest objection nobody says out loud, and it is the real one. It is hard to sit across from a mother and have nothing to offer her but attention. I have done it too often, and it has never once gotten easier.

Do it anyway. It is an hour, and it changes what every number after it means.

Whitney Hight, a thirty-six-year-old mother of three, ate the Market’s Ramona Red chicken salad on June 25. The mayonnaise in it was built on raw, unpasteurized shell eggs — something the California Retail Food Code forbids by name.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (August 18, 2026) — Whitney Lynn Hight and her husband, Casey Hight, of Ramona, filed suit today in San Diego County Superior Court against Ramona Family Naturals, Inc., which operates Ramona Family Naturals Market at 325 6th Street, and against Eben-Haezer’s Happy Hens, the Ramona egg ranch that the County of San Diego has now publicly identified as the source of the raw eggs used in the Market’s house-made mayonnaise. The Hights are represented by Frederic L. Gordon of San Diego and by William Marler of Marler Clark, the national food safety law firm, whose application for admission pro hac vice is forthcoming.

The County announced the outbreak on July 28, 2026, reporting thirteen confirmed and probable cases, four of them hospitalized, with illness onsets reaching back to June 21. The County identified the suspect food as house-made mayonnaise prepared with raw, unpasteurized eggs — mayonnaise the Market folded into its chicken salads and into its Ramona Red Sauce, which was spread on deli sandwiches and also sold by the bottle. The cases were tied to one another by whole genome sequencing.

The outbreak has not stopped growing. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on August 15 that the case count had risen to twenty-one. On August 17 the County issued a further update, “Ramona Salmonella Outbreak Grows,”confirming twenty-one cases including seven hospitalizations, naming Happy Hens itself as the source of the eggs, and reporting that additional cases of the same Salmonella strain, unrelated to the Market, are under investigation. The strain is turning up in people who never bought a sandwich in Ramona.

There has still been no recall. No list of the retail and food service customers that received Happy Hens eggs has been published. Happy Hens — which says on its own website that roughly fourteen thousand hens produce about twelve thousand eggs a day for customers in San Diego, Orange, and Los Angeles Counties — responded to the County’s announcement by denying on social media that its farm is linked to the outbreak. The County’s action so far has been to remind retail food facilities that may have received those eggs about storage, grading, and resale.

Whitney Hight bought the Ramona Red chicken salad on June 25, 2026, and ate it at home that day. She became ill on the evening of June 27 and was severely ill for roughly ten days. At the worst of it she had diarrhea more than twenty times a day, could not keep down a sip of water, ran a fever to 103 degrees, and could not stand or walk without help. She was seen at urgent care in Ramona on June 30 and taken to the emergency department at Palomar Medical Center in Escondido on July 2, severely dehydrated, with dangerously low potassium and imaging that showed colitis and inflammation involving her liver. Her stool tested positive for Salmonella on July 3. She missed two weeks of work and returned on July 13 while still symptomatic, because the household could not afford for her not to.

On the Fourth of July — her family’s holiday — she was too sick to get out of bed to watch her oldest son march in the Ramona parade. Casey Hight spent those weeks as the sole caregiver for the couple’s three young children, eight, five, and one, while caring for his bedridden wife, checking on her through the night, and answering the older children when they asked whether their mother was going to be all right. His claim for loss of consortium is the fifth count of the complaint.

The complaint alleges that this outbreak was the product of a practice California law prohibits outright. Health and Safety Code section 114012, part of the California Retail Food Code, requires a food facility to substitute pasteurized eggs or pasteurized egg products for raw shell eggs in preparing foods that are not thoroughly cooked, and it names mayonnaise expressly. The only lawful route around it is a written variance from the department. The complaint alleges, on information and belief, that no variance was ever issued to the Market. A violation of the Retail Food Code is a misdemeanor.

The complaint further alleges that Happy Hens was subject to, and failed to comply with, the California shell egg food safety rule and the federal Egg Safety Rule at 21 C.F.R. Part 118. Both impose mandatory Salmonella Enteritidis prevention obligations — vaccination, environmental monitoring of the layer houses, egg testing when the houses test positive, and diversion of those eggs to pasteurization — on any producer with three thousand or more laying hens. Happy Hens runs a flock more than four times that size.

The complaint pleads five causes of action: strict product liability, breach of express and implied warranties, negligence, negligence per se, and loss of consortium. It seeks damages in an amount to be proven at trial and demands a jury.

“California did not leave this to judgment. The statute names mayonnaise. It tells a food facility to use pasteurized eggs, and the only way out is a written variance signed by the department. You either got one or you didn’t. This is not a close question of food science — it is a rule with the product written into the text of it.” — William Marler

“There is no kill step in a raw egg. Salmonella Enteritidis gets inside the egg before the shell is formed, so washing the shell does nothing, candling does not find it, and a clean, uncracked, certified organic, pasture-raised egg carries it just as well as any other egg. Pasteurize it or cook it. Those are the choices. A premium label is a marketing decision, not a control measure.” — William Marler

“Twenty-one people are sick, seven went to the hospital, the County says the same strain is showing up in people who never set foot in that market, and as of tonight there is no recall, no published customer list, and the eggs are still for sale. The farm’s answer was a denial on social media. That is not how you close an outbreak.” — William Marler

About Marler Clark

Marler Clark, The Food Safety Law Firm, is the nation’s leading law firm representing victims of foodborne illness outbreaks. The firm has represented thousands of individuals in claims against food companies whose contaminated products have caused life-altering injury and death, and has recovered more than $900 million for its clients. William Marler began representing foodborne illness victims in 1993, as lead counsel in the Jack in the Box E. coli O157:H7 outbreak. He is the publisher of Food Safety News and the Marler Blog.

Media Contact

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(206) 346-1888 | bmarler@marlerclark.com

Lobbyists – President Ulysses S. Grant is often credited with popularizing or coining the term in the 1860s while smoking and greeting people in the lobby of the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., though printed records of the word actually predate his presidency.

Jessica Glenza read the lobbying disclosures and named four organizations that had lobbied on the Food Traceability Rule. I spent yesterday reading further into the same database. What follows is what the filings say, with a link to every one of them, and one finding that has nothing to do with anybody’s money.

Start with the cleanest sentence in the record. The International Foodservice Distributors Association, reporting on the last quarter of 2025 and signed by its chief executive Mark S. Allen Jr. on January 20 of this year, lists its work on the Food Traceability Rule and then describes that work, in its own words, as support for the 30-month compliance date extension and targeted flexibilities. No euphemism, no talk of collaboration. The three people who did it are named on the page: Mala Parker, Kristin Spiridon and Joseph Kalmin.

The National Restaurant Association filed on the same day for the same quarter, signed by Sean Kennedy, its executive vice president of public affairs. Its food page lists the fiscal 2026 agriculture and FDA appropriations bill, H.R. 4121 and S. 2256, for provisions regarding FDA traceability. It then lists H.R. 5371, the fiscal 2026 continuing appropriations, for provisions regarding FDA traceability. It lists the Food Traceability Enhancement Act as draft legislation. H.R. 5371 is the bill that ended the November shutdown, and it carried Section 780, the provision barring the FDA from spending a dollar to administer or enforce the rule before July 20, 2028. The association named the vehicle by number in the quarter it passed. The lobbyists on that page are Matt Walker, Dan Roehl, Sean Kennedy, Laura Abshire and Aaron Frazier.

One aside, because the confusion is everywhere. The delay did not ride on the Big Beautiful Bill. The same restaurant association filing lists the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, on its tax page and H.R. 5371 on its food page. Two different bills, four months apart. The funding prohibition is in Public Law 119-37, the shutdown deal.

Now go back two years. The National Retail Federation’s report for the first quarter of 2024, signed by general counsel Stephanie Martz, says the federation requested language in the fiscal 2024 agriculture appropriations bill to require the FDA to work collaboratively with industry to address concerns with the traceability rule, and that it sought support for H.R. 7563, the Food Traceability Enhancement Act. One lobbyist is named on that page: Scott Vinson.

H.R. 7563 deserves its own paragraph. Introduced on March 6, 2024, it would have amended Section 204(d) of the Food Safety Modernization Act to relieve retail food establishments, restaurants and warehouses of the duty to keep traceability lot codes and pass them down the chain and would have required the FDA to run a series of pilot projects before enforcing any compliance date. In an interview published by the Institute of Food Technologists, a former FDA official who oversaw the agency’s outbreak response said that stripping the lot code requirement essentially guts the rule, because true public health tracebacks stop being possible without it. The Safe Food Coalition opposed the bill in 2024 on exactly the ground it wrote to congressional leadership on this month. The bill never got a vote and died with the 118th Congress.

Here is the part that requires no inference about money. H.R. 7563 was introduced by Scott Franklin of Florida and cosponsored by Sanford Bishop of Georgia and Jimmy Panetta of California. Franklin sat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies in the 118th Congress and is its vice chair in the 119th. Bishop is that subcommittee’s ranking member in both and was its chairman in the 117th. Andy Harris of Maryland chairs it. The FDA sits squarely in its jurisdiction. The sponsor and the lead cosponsor of the bill to relax the traceability rule were both sitting in the room where the FDA’s money gets written.

A word on where these men answer to. Franklin represents Florida’s 18th, the Florida Heartland, and lives in Lakeland, which the current map places inside his district. Publix Super Markets is headquartered there, and Publix is one of the four organizations the Guardian found lobbying on the rule. Bishop represents Georgia’s 2nd, the largest district in the state and the one that grows more peanuts than any other in the country. It takes in Blakely, the seat of Early County, where the Peanut Corporation of America ran the plant behind the outbreak that killed nine people, sickened hundreds and sent the company’s chief executive to federal prison. Panetta represents California’s 19th, which runs from south San Jose down the Monterey County coast. 

The bill died in Energy and Commerce. Its provisions did not. In June 2024 the Center for Science in the Public Interest reported that language from H.R. 7563 had surfaced in the House subcommittee’s fiscal 2025 bill. It surfaced again in the fiscal 2026 House bill, H.R. 4121. In November it became law as Section 780. Three bills across two appropriations cycles, carrying the same ask through the one committee where it needed no hearing, no floor debate and no vote of its own.

The Senate did not go along. In Senate Report 119-37, accompanying its own version of the agriculture and FDA bill, the Senate Appropriations Committee directed the opposite of what the House wanted: that the FDA may not use funds to delay enforcement beyond July 20, 2028, and that full compliance and enforcement begin by then. The Congressional Research Service notes that this language carries the same weight as the joint explanatory statement. The Senate subcommittee is chaired by John Hoeven of North Dakota, with Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire as ranking member, and its bill came out of committee twenty-seven to nothing. Section 780 is a House product. Among the senators on that subcommittee is Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who has been writing letters about this outbreak all summer. He is well placed to ask why his own committee’s language did not survive.

Section 780 did more than defund. It also told the FDA to work with industry on lot-level approaches, and on February 19 of this year the agency announced that the resulting stakeholder engagements would be organized by the Partnership for Food Traceability, an industry membership nonprofit founded in 2024. A client alert from Covington & Burling records the detail the agency notice leaves out: the first session, held on March 6, was open only to the partnership’s members, with later sessions open to the public. The partnership says on its own site that it will not advocate specific policy positions with the FDA as part of this process, and I have no reason to doubt that. The structure is the story. Congress ordered a federal agency to consult industry about a rule industry had asked it to postpone, the consultation is convened by industry, and the first meeting was closed to everyone else.

The industry conversation that produced the delay argument is on the record too. The Reagan-Udall Foundation ran three roundtables for the FDA in 2024 with more than two dozen participants. The Guardian named Chipotle, the Kellogg Company, Kwik Trip, the National Restaurant Association, the National Grocers Association and McDonald’s. Food Dive’s coverage of the same report adds General Mills, FMI, Subway, the International Fresh Produce Association and United Natural Foods. The published summary has industry describing significant increases in labor, equipment and space, with the costs that come with them.

None of which means all of industry asked for this. Part of industry asked for this. Kroger told its suppliers to be ready ahead of the deadline. De Ann Davis of the Western Growers Association told the Guardian that growers have been collecting this shipment data voluntarily for more than a decade and that her organization supports the rule. FMI gave the Guardian a serious answer, and it deserves to be stated rather than waved at: the rule is extraordinarily complex, it demands unprecedented coordination among growers, manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers and foodservice operators, and its member companies have four years of work invested in it. That is not frivolous. Traceability only functions when everyone in a chain is doing it, and companies that were genuinely ready did find themselves waiting on partners who were not. The associations that lobbied for delay represent the ready and the unready alike. They spoke for the unready or unwilling.

A sequence of dates to finish on. The FDA held its public meeting on lot-level traceability on June 15 of this year, with written comments due July 15. The CDC now puts the first illness in this outbreak on June 14. The meeting on how to make the rule easier to live with convened the day after the first person got sick, and the comment period closed the day before the FDA announced it was investigating Cyclospora in lettuce. Nobody in that room knew. That is the whole point of a traceability rule, and the reason fifteen and a half years of delay is not a scheduling matter.

Traceability draws a line. It says what everything else is. Without the line, fear prices the entire category and the whole category pays, which is why the associations that asked for the delay were arguing against their own members’ interests as much as against anybody’s health. An epidemiologist in Michigan asked three times where the lettuce came from. The records that would have answered her exist, in some form, in warehouses and distribution centers across the country. Congress has told the FDA it may not spend a dollar to go get them until July of 2028.

That can be undone, and two sets of people are placed to undo it. The first is the Senate. Its own appropriators wrote language directing that enforcement begin by July 2028 and not a day later, and that language did not survive. Senator Hoeven, Senator Shaheen and Senator Ossoff, whose letters this summer are already part of the record, are entitled to an answer about how the opposite provision came out of conference, and so is everyone who got sick. Nobody has asked in public. The second is the part of the industry that never wanted the delay. Western Growers says its members have been collecting this data voluntarily for more than a decade. Kroger told its suppliers to be ready. If the companies and associations that are already compliant asked Congress to unwind Section 780, the argument that industry cannot manage the rule would collapse, because it would be industry saying otherwise. Eleven consumer, public health and labor organizations have already asked. They should not be asking by themselves.

Three reporting teams have now been through this outbreak’s paperwork, and between them they have documented three separate delays with three separate causes. Daniela Sirtori at Bloomberg News filed a public records request in Michigan and published on August 3. Jessica Nix and Kristina Peterson, also at Bloomberg, reconstructed the week of the recall and published on July 21. Christina Jewett and Julie Creswell at the New York Times obtained the same Michigan correspondence under the state’s open records law and published Saturday morning. Put them end to end and you have a calendar.

The first delay: twelve days to get a supplier list.

On July 1, Michigan’s rapid response team asked Yum Brands for Taco Bell’s supply chain records. On July 2, the state health department held a call with the company; in a follow-up email, officials asked to be connected with Yum’s supply chain quality assurance team and its communications team. On July 3, the state asked for the records again. On July 6, the rapid response team asked a third time — Lauren Edwards, an epidemiologist on that team, wrote that given the pace of the outbreak and the number of people already sick, the information was needed in time to preserve public health. Later that day, some records arrived. On July 8, FDA asked for more. On July 13, the agency had everything it needed. On July 15 it named a Taylor Farms plant in Guanajuato.

The Food Traceability Rule, FSMA 204, would have required those records within twenty-four hours of the request. It was set to take effect in January of this year. Last year the administration pushed it to the middle of 2028, on the reasoning that companies needed more time to get ready, and Congress then barred FDA from spending its appropriation to enforce the rule at all while urging a rewrite with more flexibility in it. The provision written to make exactly this request answerable in a day is four years out and unenforceable in the meantime. I wrote about that yesterday.

Records in hand on July 2 does not mean a recall on July 3. Traceback takes real time after the paper arrives — you work backward through distributors and processors and growing regions, and you check what you find before you name a company. The honest claim is narrower and much harder to argue with. Eleven of those twelve days sat in precisely the place the rule was written to eliminate, and they were spent by a state epidemiologist sending the same request three times.

Set the shelf life next to the calendar. FDA says the recalled iceberg was distributed from June 29 through July 16. Bagged lettuce runs about nineteen days. Roughly half of that distribution window ran while the question of where the lettuce came from was still open — not because nobody asked, but because asking was the only thing anyone was entitled to do.

Donald Prater, FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for food, told the Times the agency responded quickly with the information it had, and that even with the twenty-four-hour rule in force it would not have made a major difference to this response. That is the government’s position on the record, and it deserves a direct answer rather than an eye-roll. Here is mine – July 1, July 3, July 6, July 8, July 13. If the rule would have changed nothing, it is fair to ask which of those five dates would have stayed where it is.

The second delay: fourteen days from the first conversation about warning people to the day people were warned.

This one is not a rule problem, and no regulation I know of would have fixed it. The July 2 follow-up email asked Yum to discuss any intervention or notification that could be taken that week to bring future case numbers down. Sarah Lyon-Callo, Michigan’s state epidemiologist, wrote that it was reassuring the company had received no complaints and had no sick staff, and that Michigan’s epidemiologic interviews were nonetheless giving a strong signal. By that point Taco Bell had already fielded a media inquiry about some of its Michigan locations. On July 4 the state told businesses and commercial kitchens handling raw produce to take extra precautions with lettuce and leafy greens. On July 7, local news in Detroit reported signs said to have been posted at some Michigan Taco Bells warning of an ingredient recall — at a time when no recall had been announced by CDC, by the state, or by the company.

The public heard on July 16. The trade got twelve days’ notice. Some customers apparently got a sign in a window. Nobody has to answer for that under any regulation, which is exactly why somebody should have to explain it out loud, and they will under oath at some point.

The third delay: sixty hours, and this is the one nobody has written about.

Nix and Peterson reconstructed the week itself. On Wednesday, July 15, CDC and FDA told Taylor Farms they believed the culprit was iceberg lettuce the company supplied to Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. The administration gave the company a deadline to initiate a voluntary recall by noon the next day. At that point the parasite had been detected in thirty-four states.

The deadline came and went.

Then the White House got involved. A pair of White House officials convened a call with FDA and CDC, asked the health agencies to walk through the specific evidence tying the outbreak to the lettuce, and wanted to review drafts of the coming press releases. Within hours they agreed the patient surveys painted a clear picture and approved the statements. The agency updates posted after 10 p.m. Eastern, hours behind schedule. They named Taco Bell. They did not name Taylor Farms, and they did not say whether there would be a recall. A US health official told Bloomberg the back-and-forth kept the public in the dark an additional sixty hours.

Read that paragraph twice, because the part that matters is easy to skim past. The evidence held. The White House looked at the epidemiology and agreed with the epidemiologists, which is more than I expected and which I will say plainly. What came out of the process was not the finding. It was the name.

I have been writing about that particular omission for most of thirty years. It has a history and a vocabulary — Restaurant Chain A, Grocery Store B, the unnamed processor. The usual defense is that the agencies withhold a name because the evidence is not firm enough yet. Here the evidence was firm enough that the White House signed off on it the same evening, and the name still came out 60 hours later. That is not a scientific judgment about certainty. That is an editorial decision about a company.

What is not in dispute is what a US official told Bloomberg about the company’s conduct through that week: it challenged the science privately and obfuscated it publicly, and the result was customer confusion. Susan Mayne, who ran what was then FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, told Bloomberg the recall notice was the most obtuse she recalls ever seeing, and that she had not encountered that much misinformation about an outbreak in her time at the agency. She apportioned the blame in both directions, including at FDA’s own weekend communications, which is why the criticism lands. She said essentially the same thing to the Times three and a half weeks later.

None of the three delays belongs at the feet of the people who ran the investigation. Nobody on Michigan’s rapid response team voted to move 204 to 2028. Nobody working a traceback wrote the appropriations language forbidding its enforcement, and nobody at CDC asked to have their press release reviewed. The people who come out of this best are the ones with the least authority — two state epidemiologists who kept asking, and the CORE analysts and traceback teams who found a processing plant in central Mexico with no positive product sample and no whole genome sequencing to help them, because for this parasite that tool does not exist.

It is worth saying what the three delays are and are not. They do not simply add up; they overlap, and one of them is a judgment rather than a clock. But they are not the same failure wearing three hats either. One is a rule that was postponed and then defunded. One is a company deciding when to tell its customers. One is a White House asking to see the drafts. Fix any one of them and the other two are still there. 

For context on the numbers: FSMA set a target of 19,200 foreign food inspections a year by 2016, and in 2025 FDA made roughly 1,100, with significant problems cited at about 80 of them. The agency has something like 440 people to inspect more than 300,000 registered food facilities here and abroad. Its last visit to the Doctor Mora plant was in 2019, as CNN reported and the Times has since confirmed. The plant shut down on July 18; inspectors reached it this week.

The Times puts the national toll at more than 24,500 confirmed or suspected cases and two deaths, which is CDC’s figure and the right one for a newspaper to cite. My own tally, built only from what the fifty state health departments publish about their own residents, stood at 30,523 last Friday night. Both are floors. Neither is the number of people who got sick.

Jessica Glenza published a piece in the Guardian this morning on the fifteen-year delay of the Food Traceability Rule, and it earns a mention here for a reason that has nothing to do with my being quoted in it. By now every outlet covering this outbreak has written the sentence about the rule being delayed. Glenza went and read the lobbying record.

Here is what is in it. In 2024 the Reagan-Udall Foundation held a roundtable with food industry representatives, among them Chipotle, the Kellogg Company, Kwik Trip, the National Restaurant Association, the National Grocers Association and McDonald’s. The published summary of that meeting has industry arguing that traceability would potentially require significant increases in labor, equipment and space, with significant associated costs. From 2024 into 2025, lobbyists for the Food Industry Association, Publix Super Markets, the National Retail Federation and the International Foodservice Distributors Association all lobbied on the rule. The Retail Federation’s own disclosures say it requested appropriations language directing FDA to work collaboratively with industry on the traceability rule, and that it sought support for a bill relaxing the requirements. The Guardian asked the Retail Federation and Publix for comment and got no response.

That is the answer to a question I have been writing around for weeks. I have said repeatedly that the delay came at industry’s urging, and I have been careful to attribute it to trade associations rather than to any named grower or processor, because that is all the public record supported. Now there is more record, and it came from a reporter doing the unglamorous work of pulling filings.

The chronology those filings sit inside is worth restating, because it is long and almost nobody outside this world carries it around. Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010 with bipartisan majorities and told FDA to propose recordkeeping requirements for high-risk foods no later than January 2013. FDA did not. The Center for Food Safety sued, and a federal court set the deadlines the agency then met: propose by September 2020, finalize by November 2022. The final rule set compliance for January 20, 2026. In March 2025 FDA announced a thirty-month extension and published it in the Federal Register that August. In November, Congress wrote the delay into the appropriations act that ended the shutdown and directed the agency not to enforce before July 20, 2028. FDA’s own page says it intends to comply with that directive. A Congressional Research Service report lays the whole sequence out.

The Food Industry Association gave the Guardian a substantive answer and it deserves to be printed rather than waved at. The association says the industry shares FDA’s commitment to strengthening traceability, that the rule is extraordinarily complex, that it requires unprecedented coordination among growers, manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers and foodservice operators, and that its member companies have put four years of work into implementing it. None of that is frivolous. Traceability only functions if everyone in a chain is doing it, and companies that were genuinely ready did find themselves depending on partners who were not.

My own argument in the piece is the one I would most like industry to actually hear:

The rule allows product to get off the market faster, so fewer people get sick, and every bit of that is good for industry, whose product is being besmirched by one entity.

Traceability draws a line. It says what everything else is. Without the line, fear prices the whole category, and the whole category pays. The Guardian reports that lettuce prices fell more than sixteen percent in July as shoppers walked past it. That was not one company’s loss. De Ann Davis of the Western Growers Association told Glenza that growers have been collecting this shipment data voluntarily for more than a decade and that her organization supports the rule — growers, on the record, asking for the thing the retail associations spent two years lobbying against.

One more thing, and I would rather say it myself than have it said for me. The line I gave Glenza at the end, about grown men running these organizations behaving like two-year-olds, reads harder on the page than it felt when I said it. What is underneath it is frustration, not contempt. The people who run these associations are not villains, most of them take this work seriously, and I have sat across tables from a good number of them. But I have been doing this since 1993, and I have now watched the same argument arrive in the same words through administrations of both parties: the coordination is not ready, the timing is not right, give us more time. Sixteen years is a long stretch of not being ready. When the answer is always more time and the outbreak is happening now, patience starts to sound like a position rather than a request.

Earlier this month, eleven consumer, public health and labor organizations asked Congress to rescind the provision that bars enforcement until 2028. I said then that they were right, and I will say it again. What Glenza added is the piece that was missing from that argument — not that the rule was delayed, which everyone knows, but who asked for the delay, in their own filings, in their own words. Go read it.

All three of them sat still this weekend. No federal page moved. No state posted a new number. That is worth saying out loud, because a quiet weekend is not the same thing as an outbreak that is finished, and the distance between those two sentences is going to matter a great deal this week.

Start with the parasite. Atlanta and College Park both last updated last Wednesday, and both still put the lettuce outbreak at 9,481 illnesses, 398 hospitalizations, two deaths and seventeen states. CDC’s national surveillance page is a different series and a week older, built on data pulled August 11: 13,895 laboratory-confirmed illnesses acquired in this country since May 1, with another 10,455 that CDC knows about and has not yet confirmed or sorted between domestic and travel. Michigan by itself reports 13,909 cases and 314 hospitalizations. And my own fifty-state count, built from what each state health department has published rather than from any federal series, stands at 30,523.

Four numbers, and not one of them is the number of people who got sick. The federal 9,481 is the count of people investigators have been able to connect to Taylor Farms lettuce, which for most of them means a person remembering where they ate. The 13,895 is everyone who got a laboratory diagnosis, whatever the source. My 30,523 is the sum of what the states themselves are willing to print. All three are floors, and the real number is well above the highest of them.

The figure I will be watching on Tuesday morning is not any of those. It is the backlog.

For most of the summer the pile of unconfirmed Cyclospora cases grew every single week, which is what an outbreak outrunning its own laboratories looks like. Last week it fell for the first time, from 12,255 down to 10,455, while confirmed cases rose by 3,427. That means most of last week’s confirmations were not new arrivals at all. They were people who got sick weeks ago finally coming out of the queue.

Missouri is worth a paragraph on its own. Nathan Koffarnus, an epidemiologist at the state health department, told a Columbia television station last Tuesday that cases are still being added daily but that the rate has noticeably slowed, and that he is hopeful the state is nearing an endpoint. He is worth listening to in part because of what he was saying in the middle of July, when Missouri had forty-three cases and he was telling the same station that they looked travel related and were not expected to be part of the national outbreak. Missouri is at 1,577 now. That is not a criticism of him. It is a fair picture of what a growing outbreak looks like from inside a state health department while it is still growing, and it is the reason I keep saying these counts are the beginning of an answer rather than the answer.

Both agencies now lead with the same line, that the best-by dates on the recalled lettuce have passed and it should no longer be in any store or restaurant. That is almost certainly true, and it is not the same sentence as the outbreak being over. The two keep getting read as though they were. FDA still lists the investigation status as ongoing, inspectors have been on the ground at the plant in Guanajuato with Mexican officials, and nobody has said publicly how the parasite got into the lettuce in the first place. Product coming off the shelf is the end of the exposure. It is not the end of the question.

The jalapeño outbreak has been frozen for eleven days: 345 people in twenty-seven states, thirty-six hospitalized, nobody dead, with the last illness beginning July 20. The recall built on those peppers keeps growing anyway. Taylor Farms, Whole Foods, Albertsons twice, NatureBest, and a USDA public health alert for meat and poultry products add up to more than 160 individual items pulled from shelves. And the company at the center of all of it, Coast Citrus Distributors of San Diego, has still never published a recall notice of its own. Eleven days have passed since FDA said the importer had agreed to recall. Every downstream company that bought those peppers has told the public what it was doing. The importer that brought them into the country has not. FDA’s advisory also still tells readers that the firm does not appear to supply jalapeños directly to grocery stores, a sentence that now sits one line above the agency’s own list of stores that received the peppers, a list that includes HEB.

The eggs are the smallest outbreak of the three and the one with a deadline attached. Ninety-eight people in seventeen states, twenty-six of them hospitalized, and a recall covering 1,589,577 dozen shell eggs that FDA classified as Class I on August 12, meaning a reasonable probability of serious harm or death. The sell-by and best-by dates on those cartons run through August 17, which is tomorrow. Tomorrow is the last day a recalled carton is still inside its own date. If you buy eggs in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi or New Mexico, go look at the carton in your refrigerator tonight and check the side for code P-1950 or 0840962.

The eggs are also the outbreak that has an answer, and the contrast is the entire problem. The company found Salmonella in its own samples at two Texas farms, a third-party laboratory sequenced them, and some of them matched the strain making people sick. That is a laboratory link between a specific farm and a specific patient. Nothing like it exists for Cyclospora. There is no whole genome sequencing for this parasite. It will not grow in culture. The lettuce investigation therefore rests entirely on epidemiology and traceback, and it always will, which is exactly why the twelve days it took Michigan to get a supplier list mattered so much more here than it would have somewhere else.

What’s up this Week?

As for the week ahead. Monday the last recalled eggs go out of date and Missouri usually posts its Sunday figure. Tuesday brings CDC’s weekly surveillance update and the backlog number, and the FDA public meeting on Listeria opens in College Park. Wednesday New York posts its weekly count. Thursday Michigan publishes county-level numbers, Ohio publishes its week, and FDA’s lettuce advisory is due for the update it has been running on a roughly weekly rhythm since July, which makes Thursday the first realistic date for anything out of Guanajuato to surface. And August 31 closes the cyclosporiasis season, which changes the calendar and does not change anybody’s diagnosis.

None of these three counts is going to stop moving when the last person stops getting sick. They will keep moving for weeks afterward, because that is how long the system takes to see what already happened. I have made my peace with that. What I would like to see this week is not a smaller number. It is somebody standing up and explaining how a parasite got into a bag of shredded lettuce, and what has been done since to keep it from getting into the next one.

Everyone writing about this summer’s Cyclospora outbreak has been reaching for the same four letters and a number — FSMA 204 — and most readers have no particular reason to know what that is or why it keeps coming up. It is worth laying out plainly, because the history is not a story about a rule being delayed once. It is a story about a rule that Congress ordered, that an agency did not write, that a federal judge eventually forced into existence, and that has now been postponed twice more, the second time by Congress itself in a bill that ended a government shutdown.

Start with what the rule does. Section 204 of the Food Safety Modernization Act directs FDA to identify the foods most often tied to foodborne illness and to require anyone handling them to keep standardized records — who they got it from, what they did to it, who they sent it to, tied to specific lots. Those foods go on something called the Food Traceability List, and leafy greens are on it. The point of the standardization is speed. When an outbreak starts, investigators can ask a restaurant chain for a spreadsheet and get an answer in a day instead of assembling a supply chain out of whatever each company happens to keep in whatever format it happens to keep it. The rule requires those records to be produced within twenty-four hours of a request, or a longer period the agency agrees to.

That is the whole idea. Now the calendar.

Congress passed FSMA with bipartisan support and it was signed in January 2011. Section 204 gave FDA a deadline: propose the recordkeeping requirements no later than January 2013. FDA did not. Years went by. The Center for Food Safety sued the agency over the missed deadline, and a federal court entered an order setting new dates — propose by September 2020, finalize by November 2022. FDA met the court’s scheduleand published the Food Traceability Final Rule on November 21, 2022, nearly a decade past the deadline Congress wrote. It took effect in January 2023, with a compliance date of January 20, 2026, giving industry three years to get ready.

In March 2025 the administration announced it would push that compliance date back thirty months, to July 20, 2028. The proposal published in the Federal Register that August and the comment period closed in September. FDA’s stated reasoning is worth repeating fairly, because it is not frivolous: traceability only works if everyone in a supply chain is doing it, and even companies that were ready said their readiness depended on partners who were not. The agency said it would spend the extra time on technical assistance and cross-sector work, and that it had no intention of changing what the rule requires.

Then Congress went further than the agency had. In November 2025, the bill that ended the longest government shutdown in American history — H.R. 5371, the Continuing Appropriations, Agriculture, Legislative Branch, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Extensions Act of 2026 — carried a provision at Section 780 of Division B. It prohibits FDA from spending appropriated funds to administer or enforce the Food Traceability Rule before July 20, 2028, and directs the agency to work with industry on lot-level approaches. The same section also restricted enforcement money for the Produce Safety Rule and the pre-harvest agricultural water requirements for certain commodities. FDA has said it intends to comply with the directive and held a public meeting on lot-level traceability in June of this year in response to it.

That distinction matters and it is the one most often lost. A delay is an agency deciding the industry needs more time. A funding prohibition is Congress removing the agency’s ability to act even if it changes its mind. The rule is on the books. It is law. FDA simply may not spend a dollar enforcing it until the summer of 2028.

There is one more piece of Section 204 that has quietly gone nowhere. The same section directed the Secretary of Health and Human Services to build a system inside FDA capable of receiving traceability information and improving the agency’s capacity to trace food. A Congressional Research Service report on the rule, citing a Government Accountability Office finding from this January, says no such internal product tracing system has been established. FDA says it has been developing one since 2022. That is fifteen years after Congress asked for it.

Who wanted the delay is a fair question and it deserves a careful answer rather than a satisfying one. The organizations that pushed hardest and most publicly for postponement were trade associations — the Food Industry Association, the National Grocers Association, the Global Cold Chain Alliance — and the International Fresh Produce Association publicly claimed the flexibilities in H.R. 5371 as a win for its members. That is ordinary, documented, above-board lobbying by groups whose members include nearly every food company in the country. It is not a secret, and nobody has pretended otherwise.

There is an argument for this rule that the industry has never made loudly enough on its own behalf, and it is an argument about its own money. A traceability system that works does more than find the contaminated lot faster. It draws a line around it. It says which company, which facility, which days of production, and in saying that it also says what everything else is. Without the line there is nothing to reassure anyone with, and fear does the only thing it can do with a category it cannot sort. It prices the whole thing.

Watch what happened this summer. FDA and the company identified iceberg lettuce from one facility in central Mexico. Everything else took the hit anyway. Fresh lettuce unit sales fell nine percent in the week ending July 18, and dollar sales of prepackaged salads fell fourteen percent over the four weeks ending July 25 against the same period a year earlier. Sweetgreen, which does not use iceberg lettuce and has been told by nobody that it is connected to any of this, lost roughly six hundred basis points of comparable sales in July and cut its full-year guidance to a decline of seven to eight percent. In the Salinas Valley, Larry Cox of Coastline Family Farms chopped three hundred thousand pounds of romaine hearts back into the soil. California romaine, not Mexican iceberg, with no evidence of contamination of any kind. The harvest work his crews were counting on went with it, and his sales are down twenty to thirty percent.

The clearest illustration is on the buying side. Sysco, the largest food distributor in the country, stopped sourcing iceberg from Mexico altogether and moved to domestic growers. Its chief executive said in the same breath that Taylor Farms is a high quality, high integrity shop. Both of those things were true at once, and that is the entire point. When a buyer cannot show a customer where a particular case came from, the only risk management left is to walk away from the category.

Somebody will answer that the line was drawn here, because the recall did name a company. It was drawn twelve days after Michigan first started asking, and it was drawn around a supplier rather than around the product in front of a shopper. By then the public advice was necessarily categorical. Buy whole heads. Skip the bagged salads. That was the right advice on what was known at the time, and it is not a criticism of anyone who gave it. It is a description of what is left when the records are not standardized and the answer takes twelve days instead of one. Categorical advice prices a category.

None of this is my observation. The peer-reviewed study of the 2018 romaine outbreak put the total societal loss at $276 million to $343 million, and its authors concluded that the episode demonstrated the economic benefit of industry-wide food safety standards and improved traceability. That was published in an agricultural economics journal. The case for Section 204 was made in the industry’s own literature. The rule the trade associations asked Congress to postpone is the same rule that would have drawn a line around one facility in Guanajuato and left everybody else’s lettuce alone.

The argument is live again right now. Eleven consumer and food safety organizations wrote to congressional leaders this month asking that the traceability rule not be delayed further and pointing at this outbreak as the reason. Whether that goes anywhere is a question about appropriations language, which is where this rule has spent most of its life.

Here is the sentence I would want a member of Congress to sit with. Congress ordered this rule in January 2011 and set a deadline of January 2013. The agency missed it, a nonprofit had to sue to get the rule written at all, and a federal judge set the schedule that finally produced it in late 2022. Compliance was to begin in January 2026. Enforcement will now begin, at the earliest, in July 2028 — and it will begin then only because Congress said the money cannot be spent before that date. Fifteen and a half years from the deadline to the enforcement. In the meantime, this country recorded the largest Cyclospora outbreak in its history, and a state epidemiologist in Michigan spent the first two weeks of July asking a restaurant company, three times, where the lettuce came from – More on that tomorrow.