It Could Happen Here - Who Is Behind America's Cyclospora Summer?

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

James looks into the recent Cyclospora outbreak and what it can tell us about solidarity, food safety, and where our food comes from. Sources: https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/magazine/spring-2026/taylor-farms/  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/23/billion-dollar-california-salad-company-exploits-undocumented-migrants-say-workers-and-teamsters https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-economist-interview-2000790016 https://www.thefp.com/p/cyclosporiasis-outbreak-lettuce-media?utm_source=publication-search https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-report-e-coli-outbreak-onions-taylor-farms/ https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2026-07-27garciatotaylorfarmsrecyclosporacontaminatedlettuce.pdf https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_name=Bruce+Taylor&contributor_employer=Taylor+Farms+ https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/07/2025-14967/requirements-for-additional-traceability-records-for-certain-foods-compliance-date-extension https://bsky.app/profile/ufw.bsky.social/post/3msj3j7ordt2w See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability.

Bell, connection is everything. When I was younger, I had a variety of jobs. From a pretty young age, I'd help out with lambing. A lot of people around us had a lot more sheep than we did. So pretty often in springtime, when I wasn't at school, I'd be dropped off at a barn in the morning with overalls, boots, and a pack lunch. After school, I worked in shipping for a tomato grower. It sucked, and I hated it. If I'm going to work that hard, I want to be outside all day.

That was the only time in my life I've ever had to interface with Microsoft Excel. It defeated me. I've done all sorts of other things too. Shot pigeons, torn about flood-damaged houses, short-order cooked, walked through the woods with a bunch of other guys to make some birds fly towards some rich people with guns, mocked out horses, they even delivered frozen turkeys on a bicycle once. I've done some horrid stuff too. Once I had to wear a hazmat soup to demolish a walk-in freezer that had been without power for a month.

It was one of the worst things I've ever smelled. It smelled worse than death. I've never seen so many grown adults vomiting in one place at one time. Hello and welcome to my podcast. I promise that will be one of the only mentions of fetid smells today. I'm Dr. James Stout and this is Natural Causes. A podcast about going outside. Today we're talking about food, the people who make it,

and the giant corporations who ship it across the Western Hemisphere and put it inside a tortilla. Let's go. So as I said, I've had lots of jobs. I hate inside work. I'm under no illusion about outside work either. A lot of people seem to glorify manual labour these days, but working outside with your hands, your back,

your aching knees and your sore feet in the hot and the cold, for endless weeks, isn't particularly bucolic either. That's the way I feel about fruit and veg freaking. It's hard, repetitive and often very poorly compensated. I have massive respect for the folks who do it, and I hope for a world where one day they are fairly compensated and treated with dignity. Right now, those folks who are out in the fields all day in the sun

and every penny they make. And sadly that's not very many pennies. So, recently, when I saw a disturbing trend of people blaming workers for the cyclospora outbreak that currently has America experiencing an unprecedented incontinence outbreak for the modern era, an outbreak that has now killed two people, and wanted to weigh in.

I don't think the reason 25,000 people, more than five times the previous record number of cases, are currently suffering through, quote, explosive diarrhea, is something we can lay at the feet of the hard-working people who pick your letters. I do think it's absolutely something we can blame on labor exploitation, voluntary self-regulation in the food industry, and the slashing of the food safety apparatus by Doge. So let's get into America's Incontinent Summer. Who's behind it? And why half the Midwest is currently experiencing? Well, let's hear from an expert what they're experiencing.

It's called explosive diarrhea because your body's not really good at telling the difference between liquid and gas. So the kind of signals you're getting when you have to go is a little bit messed up. And so you may think it's one thing. And you've got just like a high volume of liquid leaving your body at that point. That's Liz, who kindly responded to my request for a shitsplosion understander when I posted it online recently. I think now is a good time to say that it's tempted as I am to use the word shitting yourself throughout this episode. I understand that that's something that folks with IBS would find hurtful. So I'm going to try and use incontinence instead. Because I would rather be unkind to people causing mass incontinence

than are people living with incontinence. Also, two people have lost their lives to this condition, so I want to bring the gravity that this deserves. Anyway, here's Liz. You can call me Liz. I work for a health department on the West Coast. In case you've somehow missed a non-stop stream of reporting on this topic, let me catch you up.

15 states in the United States are currently experiencing a cyclist war outbreak. Cyclospora is a little parasite and it finds its way into the human body via ingestion. In this case, it finds its way into the human body by ingesting lettuce. The outbreak was first linked to a salad served at Taco Bell.

You shocked? But obviously Taco Bell doesn't grow salad. A company called Taylor Farms-Dermaincourt does, though. On the 17th of July, they voluntarily pulled their iceberg lettuce from shelves and the next day they were identified as the cause of this outbreak by the FDA. Then the FDA announced they had found cyclosporin Taylor Farms' letters, and then they retracted that statement.

But they nonetheless said that they had, quote, overwhelming epidemiological data that linked the salad producer to the incontinence outbreak flowing through the Midwest. Taylor Farms is a huge conglomerate that grows much of its lettuce in Mexico. It's based in California and is the world's largest cut fruit and veg producer. In a profile of the company for the Berkeley Hath School of Business newsletter, it's identified. as being a, quote, $7 billion enterprise. I don't know if that means revenue or value or what, but it's a big ass company. They have about 25,000 employees, which is roughly equal to a number of people within continents due to their lettuce.

But what exactly is this cyclospora stuff, and how did it get into a crunch wrap? Cyclospora catanensis only infects human beings, at least as far as we know. In order to replicate, it has to infect the lightning of our intestines. So it needs to have a cycle through a human body in order to infect other human beings. you know, it's shed when somebody who has an infection, has diarrhea or, you know, just otherwise has a bowel movement somewhere. That material gets into the environment. And then the parasite in the form that it's shed, it has to spend a couple weeks out in just the open environment to kind of grow, it's not really a shell, but it's kind of a shell. It insists or it

sporulates is the kind of term for it. And then only after that happened. And then only after that happens, you get infected with it. It's got a very durable shell. The shell allows it to kind of be ingested by people, get through our stomach acid, and into our intestines where it breaks open and it starts the cycle again. I think this is where the basis for the supposition that this comes from farm workers comes from. But let's consider that a bit more deeply. The logic goes, I think, that someone used the bathroom, either in a field or in a porta pot or something, and then couldn't wash their hands or didn't wash their hands. Like, everyone pause here and say, I'm an outside person, are shit in the woods more often than most people. But most people are not just

dropping trial in a field. Let's throw that one out as a fairly ridiculous and quite racist supposition. In some parts of tropics, cyclospora is endemic, and people there tend to suffer a lot less of the symptoms that people here suffer when they contract it. That means that sometimes cyclospora is present in the water supply, and if clean water is not being used to irrigate crops, then the cyclospora parasite could have got on crops that way. The question we should be asking, though, is how did it go from one field or a number of fields to 25,000 infections? It is possible that someone wasn't provided with proper hand-washing capabilities at a port-abody. Even if that person picked letters for the rest of their shift,

that does not account for the scale of what's happening to the sewers of the Midwest right now. I asked Liz what might explain it. Now, this is just speculation, but I do think it's well-informed speculation. You can have a small number of heads of lettuce that have the parasite on it, but if it's going through a shredder and the shredder is not cleaned all the time, it's like a super spreader event for cyclospora. Like, you know, you're singing into the vent in a cruise ship, but it's cyclospora through a lettuce shredder.

These facilities might wash lettuce with chlorine, but chlorine isn't going to kill cyclospora. So now our lettuce is contaminated, and we have created a machine that effectively duss every lettuce that goes through it with a microdose of parasites and then sends it on its merry way north, where it makes it into a tailor farm salad product that is sold to any number of restaurants or customers, and then someone eats it, and then they experience incontinence. In fact, the day that we're recording this, which is the 14th, a couple of days before you receive it, we just learned that the FDA has sent inspectors to a Taylor Farm's processing plant in Mexico. I don't know why it took them this long, but it does give more credence to this theory that Liz has. So how do we get from that to an outwork? Well, I have not eaten at Taco Bell since George W. Bush is president, but my understanding is that it has a bad reputation regarding this exact issue.

Actually, Taylor Farm supplies many other retailers repaired food and sells some packaged product to consumers that are also being recalled right now. Amusingly, I went on the FDA website today to confirm the record items. and I found that Taylor Farms is now doing a different, separate, subsequent recall for Salmonella as well. Great stuff. But before we get any further into this, we're 10 minutes into the show existing. I think I have thoroughly burned any future Taco Bell partnership potential. But like 25,000 people in the Midwest, I am obligated to spray some shit out right now in the form of advertisements.

Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com.com.com. Connection is everything.

Up to St. Clair wrote a book about migrant labor in the food industry. And I want to quote from that now. So long as we have wage slavery, answered Shillerman, It matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be. It is easy to find people to perform it. But just as soon as the labour is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise. So, one by one, the old, dingy and unsanitary factories will come down. It will be cheaper to build new, and so the steamstitch will be provided with stoking machinery,

and the dangerous trades will be made safe, or substitutes will be found for their products. In exactly the same way as the citizens of our industrial republic become refined. year by year the cost of slaughter house products will increase until eventually those who want to eat meat will have to do their own killing and how long do you think the custom would survive then? Well, how did that work out? It turns out instead of conditions getting better,

labor getting more free and food prices rising, capital got more free and labor got more controlled. Starting with the passage of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, it has become easier and easier for money to cross borders and harder and harder for people to do the same thing. Indeed the same year that NAFTA came into force, Operation Gatekeeper here in San Diego saw a significant upsweep in border militarization. US unions responded to this moment badly,

rather than saying, if our bosses want to employ people in Mexico and pay them less, we will organize our siblings in Mexico, and together we will demand the same dignified wages. They double down on economic nationalism. So now, some of your letters comes from Mexico, where hardworking folks get paid too little to work long hours cutting it in the fields so Taylor Farms can make millions. They don't just abuse labour in Mexico.

Here's a quote from a 2014 piece in The Guardian about Taylor Farms. If you complain to them, they'll call La Migra, said Rosie Guaralupe, a former supervisor using a Latino term for immigration and customs enforcement, a department of Homeland Security Agency, also known as ICE. If you don't have papers, that scares you. The managers said, we didn't have any rights to form a union, because they were illegals there. They said they'd start deporting people to Mexico, said Julian Camacho, a former loader who said he lost his job

for trying to organize a union. The company cited other reasons, including a safety violation. In fact, this is not the first time Taylor Farms has been complicit in a diarrhea outbreak. Here's Charlie Kennett, a food microbiologist, explaining a little history of these outbreaks.

My name is Charles Kennedy, but I go by Charlie to most people, so you can call me Charlie. I've had over 35 years experienced in 1998 fruit salad of an unknown country of origin caused seven cases mostly in Georgia. In 1999, raspberries caused 94 cases mostly in Florida. In the year 2000, raspberries and blackberries from Guatemala caused 19 cases from mostly Georgia. So what you're seeing as a pattern of this happening every year, but nothing like 11,000 cases, right? In 2005, two basal outbreaks, in 2008 sugar snap peas from Guatemala.

In 2013, this was a big one, 631 cases in North America traced to suppliers in Puebla, Mexico. And guess who it was? Taylor Farms. Taylor Farms responded to this outbreak there. they did so voluntarily, and that sounds great, right? Well, here's Liz again. Taylor Farms at that time, back when these outbreaks were happening, really put a lot of effort into trying to voluntarily put a lot of protections into place

to make sure the food safety was better. They've kind of completely destroyed all of their goodwill on that. It used to be like, you want to protect people from getting a foodborne illness from packaged lettuce, like look at Taylor Farms, and now it's like, what are you guys doing? Also, you have to think, voluntary. infection control, voluntary, whatever, is just a way to not be regulated, right? It's like, we're showing control, so you don't have to regulate us, but if you're going to have systems so complex, like food systems so complex and international, you have to have the

capacity to regulate them to be able to ding them. By 2024, Taylor Farm's had fully stopped volunteering to make its food safe, at least according to an FDA report that found a lack of hand-washing facilities and significant cross-contamination between different foodstuffs, which sounds a lot like Lizzie's high-beye. bot this for the 2026 outbreak. All right, so we've established a villain, the comic book evil salad company that sells cut fruit and veg under several brands to chains at customers all around the country. And in case you're not yet convinced, please also know that Barri Weiss's substack newsletter has entered this discourse firmly on the side of the diarrhea, try to paint it as

unremarkable and non-lethal. But now that two people have died, and the outbreak has continued to grow for more than a month despite being identified, it seems entirely. reasonable that the federal government should shoulder some of the blame for failing to keep people safe. What about that capacity to ding them that Liz mentioned? Well, if you cast your mind back to 2025, before Elon Musk had a tantrum and left the government, the world's richest man was busy tearing apart parts of the federal government that do useful things and posting racist stuff on his website. He still does the racist stuff, but after blowing up the capacity of agencies like the FDA, he quit his job at Doge and returned to full-time posting. So what does all this mean for

the safety of your salad. I will say part of this has to do with staffing cuts at FDA and at CDC, for sure. It's a lot harder to do this work when you're understaffed. Like, you can't just email people these questionnaires. You can't just, like, put something on a machine and run it and expect the result. Like, it is complicated to suss out whether a test is positive or negative sometimes. It's like Lospora is hard to diagnose. It's hard to detect.

It's especially hard to detect in produce. The procedure for a traceback in the event of an outbreak is pretty labor intensive, and at first it often falls on state public health agencies. Essentially, someone either test positive for food-borne illness, which is less likely in the case of cyclospora, as GI doctors tell me it's not something they often test for it first, or someone reports an outbreak, and then, well, I'll let Liv take it from here. So if you have a reportable disease like cyclospora, we get a lab slip saying this person with this phone number, this contact information, tested positive for this pathogen. From there, we take a look at

the actual test result, make sure it looks like it's like a reasonably, like, accurate test result, because sometimes there can be some, you know, issues with reporting or whatever, but usually we look at it, it's like, okay, this is definitely somebody in our jurisdiction who we want to reach out to. So we pull up something called the hypothesis generating questionnaire, which is a food survey, right? We have a bunch of questions for things that we know have caused outbreaks of cyclists for in the past. And we call them up. And we ask this person, hi, like, can you spend a little bit of time with us? We understand you've been sick recently.

We'd like to learn a little bit more about your illness and where you may have caught it so that we can, you know, figure out if there's anything we need to do. What follows is a fairly involved questioning in which the public health worker has to build trust with someone actively experiencing incontinence and then do an investigation into what they ate and where they ate it in the past few weeks. Because at a relatively long time period between ingesting something with cyclospora and the onset of symptoms,

it can be hard for people to recall, so there can be a lot of credit card and receipt checking involved. Many of those state agencies rely on federal grants, which they might not be getting right now. So even though Doge cannot directly fire state staffers, they're still suffering because Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, a man who has lived such a miserable life

that he thinks homegrown tomatoes are worse than store-bought ones, decided it would be funny to fuck up the USA's food safety apparatus for a few months. Indeed, this could be behind a strange saga of the FDA claiming a positive test for cyclospora in Taylor Farms' letters, then rescinding that claim. PCR tests, like the one for cyclospora, can be difficult to read. There's something called a cycle value threshold, or a cycle threshold value,

where essentially you're going through these cycles of amplifying the genetic materials. And the CT value, there's a cutoff on where it counts as positive or negative. My guess is there had something close to that cutoff. And because I didn't have somebody who's really familiar with this particular pathogen, it wasn't clear whether it was a positive or negative. It was probably like an indeterminate. And there was just maybe pressure to get something out fast. And so they said, oh, we found it. Then Taylor Farms came back. It's like, that wasn't the batches of lettuce that's causing people to get sick. And it's a threshold value. It's like on the cusp in an intermittent value. So you can't actually say

it's there. And then there's probably political pressure and things like that that was happening. There certainly might be some political pressure. Rep Robert Garcia, ranking member of the committee on oversight and government reform, wrote to Taylor Farms, saying, in 2025 alone, Taylor Farms donated more than $2 million to political action committees tied to President Donald Trump and other Republicans and spent over $810 million on lobbying related to food safety regulation. Last March, Taylor Farms donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., President Trump's SuperPack. This massive donation occurred less than one week after the Trump administration agreed to delay

implementation of a critical food safety rule that would make it easier to trace contaminated produce back to suppliers and remove it from the food supply. Taylor Farms went on social media after the FDA rescinded its false positives and claimed it had received an, quote, apology from the FDA. The FDA denies this, and says that strong evidence still points to Taylor Farms, as I said earlier. I think this points more to an overstretched agency than active complicity. But let's look a little deeper at the food safety rule, Garcia mentions. He's referring to the food traceability rule, and that is part of the Food Safety Modernization Act, FSMA for short. The original compliance date for the food traceability rule was Tuesday,

January 20, 26. The FDA proposed to extend the compliance date by 30 months in 2025, quoting from a document by the bipartisan and congressional research service. In September 2024, a stakeholder roundtable report published by the Reagan-Udahl Foundation for the FDA indicated that industry stakeholders may not be aware of or prepared to be in compliance with the rule by January 26. In March 2025, the FDA announced its extension to extend the compliance state by 30 months, and in August 2025 a notice of proposed rulemaking to provide additional time to cupboard entities to coordinate across the supply chain to fully implement the rule. Records do show that Bruce Taylor, Taylor Farm's CEO, really likes to donate to Republicans

and Pax to support them. Taylor Farm supports these packs as well, and lobby's pretty hard, but I don't think this points to a direct quid pro quo. Because in a sense, I think it's more than that. Taylor Farnth has a million reasons to support Trump beyond this one rule. They like to use threats of ICE enforcement to treat their workers like shit. They benefit from the tearing down of the federal regulation infrastructure and the idea that corporations can self-regulate instead, in the same way that Elon Musk also benefits from it. They want to abuse labor in Mexico

and make sure those workers can't come here for a better wage and a better life, so they support Trump's border regime. There is not a little quid pro quo conspiracy here, in my opinion. There is a big, broad and very open alignment between capital and the state against workers, farmers, and ultimately against your food safety. Anyway, here's some stuff you can buy. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite?

Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode eight before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Last week, I was in Washington today covering the wildfires. The sky was so smoky you couldn't see the sun.

At night, riddelines glowed red with the approaching fire, and the moon looked orange in the smoky sky like a levitating jacko lantern for too early Halloween. The air quality index was high, and being outside was dangerous for people with respiratory conditions. But not so far away, in an even worse AQI area, farm workers were picking, weeding, irrigating, and staking fruit and veg for a minimum wage. Many of them were not provided with masks. Some of them needed inhalers to breathe, according to UFW posts detailing their conditions. These people worked long hours, even if it's hot or wet or smoky or cold, so that you can buy the big thing of lettuce for five bucks, and Bruce Taylor of Taylor Farms can make an obscene amount of money.

In Mexico, where it grows most of its letters, Taylor Farms can pay even less. A whole food chain relies on these massive corporations, and they, in turn, rely on workers sacrificing their health for very little money. Although it might not seem like it by the time your food gets to the supermarket, everything we eat comes from the soil, the sun, or sometimes the water. If we want the food we eat to keep us healthy, we need to invest in the people who grow it. and the people who check it safe, the places it is grown and the way it comes to us. We need to think about safety and solidarity not as distinct issues, but as things that go hand in hand. Groups like UFW work to protect and organize farm workers, and we should support them.

We should also think about how we can build a food system that decouple sustenance from mega-capitalism and that ensures nobody goes hungry and nobody has to be afraid of their food, making them sick. I hope you'll subscribe as we talk to more farm workers and organizers. We'll be dropping new episodes every Monday and if you subscribe, they'll drop onto your phone wherever podcasts are given away for free. I hope if you're listening to this in the fields, you'll reach out. You can email us at Natural Causespod at proton.me. If you want that email to be encrypted, you'll need a proton mail address as well.

Next week, I want to talk about what took me to Washington in the first place, and the thing that has allowed people to feed themselves for thousands of years on this landscape, fire. Because the world's on fire right now, and it turns out the places to look for help might not be the people who want to put the fire out, but the people who have learned to live with it. I want to break our fire coverage down to a couple of episodes.

What to do with the fire comes to you, and we'll do that first because we're only just beginning our slightly too hot person summer. And then we're going to do a second episode on Indigenous Fire Knowledge and how we can learn to live with fire. Thank you for listening to our first show. I do want to say that when you listen to one of these podcasts, you hear my voice. But there's a whole team of people who make these things, and I want to acknowledge all of them.

So Sophie Lichtenen is a producer. Abu Zafar has also produced a show and has got me to use a spreadsheet for the first time in my adult life. And Adam Wand has done an incredible job. I think you'll all agree editing the audio here. So thank you very much, everyone. Natural Causes, the production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for natural causes listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.