Lettuce Bomb: Cleanup on Aisle Nine

Haven't we had enough of this sh*t? (w/Sonali Kolhatkar)

Why do we accept an outbreak of “explosive diarrhea” as business as usual? Why is food contamination, a scourge we once largely conquered, making a comeback? And when a company that has poisoned the public tries to cover it up so it can keep poisoning us, why do so many of us seem to think that just the way the world works?

The latest article from Sonali Kolhatkar (Zero Hour Senior Correspondent and so much more) provides some much-needed context for the current outbreak of cyclospora infections. From deregulation to climate change, this horrific outbreak is the result of deliberate political changes.

If things don’t change, this will happen again and again. As these words are being written, in fact, the FDA says a new outbreak of cyclospora has appeared which is not connected to lettuce. Which raises the metaphorical (and literal) question, When will we decide we’ve had enough of this sh*t?

You’ll find selected quotes and a (lightly edited) transcript below.

Selected Quotes

Sonali:

• “We’re relying on market forces to keep us safe, and that’s not a public-health strategy.”

• “Food safety shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”

• “We have to be able to rely on government to keep our food safe.”

• “We need to break up food monopolies and strengthen small farms.”

Richard:

• “Nobody’s going to run for office saying ‘our party is objectively pro-explosive-diarrhea.’”

• “How is the market supposed to correct a failure when consumers don’t even know whose product they’re buying?”

• “Whenever you centralize an entire system around a handful of giant players, one failure threatens everyone.”

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Transcript

Richard: So you have a new piece out, and it’s about the tainted lettuce story. Give us the brief overview, if you would.

Sonali: Many of your viewers have probably heard that we’re supposed to be avoiding lettuce right now. Thousands of people—largely in the Midwest, with Michigan a major hotspot—have been affected. Something like 7,000 people have been documented as infected with cyclosporiasis, a parasitic infection in a similar class to E. coli and salmonella. It’s not as fatal as those, but it’s incredibly difficult, with symptoms that have been described as explosive diarrhea.

Nobody wants that. It’s left people debilitated. Even people who’ve recovered have been left with weakened immune systems—kind of like COVID, where getting it is terrible, and generally you recover, but some people remain affected long-term.

This is a very serious thing, and the federal government hasn’t quite been able to pin down the origin of the contaminated lettuce. But right now, all indications point to one of the four major providers of fresh-cut salad greens in the United States: Taylor Farms. Taylor says it’s still in the middle of its investigation, but that seems to be it.

There are a lot of implications around this story that I get into in my piece.

Richard: I want to talk about them. Let me start with the meta-story here. Not too long ago, as a friend or an editor reading your piece, I would have said that the phrase “nobody wants explosive diarrhea”—which appears in your piece—was unnecessary, Sonali. Normally, an editor would flag that.

But we now live in an environment, and this is a given, where we’re dismantling regulation and where greed and corporate interest are influencing our politics to such a degree that it’s made all the old logical assumptions so hazy that it actually becomes necessary to spell things out like that, doesn’t it?

Sonali: Yes. And the reason I put that in there—it’s interesting you bring that up—is that the implication of our current system is that this is just something we have to live with. We must accept that, in the interest of the free market, in the interest of letting big producers and big companies do what they need to do to feed us—and of course their goal is to make a profit—we have to pay the price for their business practices.

And if that means 7,000 people getting explosive diarrhea, so be it, right? That’s the implication behind it. But these are preventable issues. In the piece, I identify three main problems: First, we have fewer and fewer food producers, processors, and distributors, which means that when one company has problems, those problems spread throughout the country because these companies are so large. Second, we have far too few regulations, and the ones we do have are currently being dismantled. Third, we do not support or sustain small farms—in fact, we’re weakening them and making life harder for them.

Small farms are where we ought to be investing. A localized food industry is a lot more resilient than a centralized one, where a single bottleneck can cause massive disruptions in supply. So those are the three issues I identified.

They’re not rocket science. It should be something we take for granted—that government regulates our food supply and its safety. But right now it’s largely voluntary. It’s shocking that we don’t have more infections than we do.

Richard: People may also minimize the severity of this illness when they think about diarrhea in general. First of all, this form of it is exceptionally painful. And as you say, it can cause long-lasting or permanent damage. I’ve read this disease can last six weeks or more. That’s horrific.

I got something similar in India forty years ago—though I didn’t get it from the people of India or the food of India. I got it on my last day in what was then Bombay, when someone took me out for dinner at the Taj Mahal Hotel, which is, you know, the elite—

Sonali: Top hotel, yeah.

Richard: Right, a hotel originally built, I believe, for British Raj administrators. I don’t know the full history, but I can tell you from personal experience: you don’t want it. You really don’t want it. You spend your time literally thinking, “How am I going to get through the next 30 seconds?” And it affected me for years afterward.

Sonali: Yeah.

Richard: So given the severity of this—and no one’s going to run for office saying “our party is objectively pro-explosive-diarrhea”—that’s exactly why I bring it up. The policies that led to this episode, and that will almost certainly lead to more outbreaks and epidemics going forward, are treated as a given.

As we dive into the specifics, I don’t want to bring my own bias to your reporting, but it seems to me this is a massive failure—even though I think the news media is trying to tell the whole story. I won’t rap them as hard as I might on other kinds of journalism, but I still don’t think they’re conveying that this is a straightforward case of cause and effect: you do A, B, and C, and this is what happens. I don’t think the general public grasps that. Am I wrong?

Sonali: Look, we pay taxes so that the federal government can protect us. That’s the whole point of regulations—it’s why we have laws about the kinds of toys you can sell toddlers. We need federal regulators ensuring our food is safe. Currently, food safety monitoring for bacterial infections runs through a very weak system called FoodNet, run under the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only 10 out of 50 states participate. It’s already extremely weak, and it was monitoring for about eight different kinds of infections.

Almost exactly a year ago, the Trump administration made monitoring voluntary for six of those eight. So now only two are mandatory: E. coli and salmonella. Cyclospora, the infection that’s now spreading, is one of the ones FoodNet is no longer required to monitor. That’s part of why they can’t find the source of this contamination. It’s shocking—we’re relying on market forces to keep us safe, on the idea that producers won’t want to hurt their bottom line because people will stop buying lettuce, so we’ll just leave it up to them to ensure the safety of their own product.

Okay, maybe that works eventually, except you first have to wait for thousands of people to suffer before market forces correct themselves. It’s different in places like Europe, where the regulatory systems are much stronger, and we deserve those same protections. But Taylor Farms, like many big corporations, is busy using its profits to lobby the government for fewer regulations. And it turns out the CEO of Taylor Farms is a big donor to the Trump administration and Trump-adjacent super PACs, and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars directly lobbying the government to dismantle regulations.

So this is a direct outcome of actions our government has taken in favor of big corporations and against the public and public health.

Richard: I’m glad you raised that: the corruption of the process through lobbying, and the power of these monopolies, or near-monopolies, this concentration across every aspect of food production and distribution. And then there’s this mythology, which I can’t believe anyone still gives credence to, that the market will take care of it. Since I read your piece this morning, I’ve been doing a little research on Taylor Farms myself. How can the market address a product failure when you don’t even know you’re buying that product in the first place?

Sonali: Right.

Richard: What struck me most in researching Taylor Farms—and this took some digging—was tracking down all the final shelf brands of packaged lettuce that actually originate with Taylor Farms. A lot of those are marketed as, say, O Organics at Safeway. Signature Select, also Safeway. GreenWise at Publix. Simply Nature at Aldi. Some of the Trader Joe’s bagged salads. 365 by Whole Foods.

People think they’re getting something wholesome there. It strikes me that what they’re doing isn’t just subverting market forces—they’re tricking people into thinking they’re buying a healthier product when they’re really just buying the same factory-made widget anyone else might sell.

Sonali: Exactly. And what they’re also doing is giving people the false impression that there’s competition and diversity on the shelves. If you go to a big supermarket that sells ten different brands of bagged lettuce, chances are you’re only looking at products from one or two companies, repackaged under different labels. Some of these are companies directly owned by the same producers. There’s no functional reason to sell lettuce under two different labels—except to give people the illusion of choice. This kind of capitalism, in particular, is charlatanism. It plays on our sense of agency, making us feel like we’re making real choices when there isn’t a real choice at all.

So people are starting to go out of their way, because they’re realizing that bagged lettuce from the store could be dangerous. They’re seeking out small farmers at farmers markets. And when I looked into how the Trump administration has undermined small farms over just the past year, I was shocked. Trump courted small farmers to get their votes, and many of them supported him. But he has cut program after program under the guise of fighting DEI initiatives. He’s cut programs that benefit farmers broadly. He’s taken away disaster aid programs. He cut a program that matched small farmers’ produce with food banks—so that low-income people had access to fresh food, and small farmers had a stable source of income. It was a win-win that benefited two important groups, and he cut it anyway.

Over and over, small farmers are going out of business. They can’t handle competition from these giant producers. So there are fewer options left for people who want to eat lettuce. We’re told we’re supposed to eat fresh food—and the government has fully failed the American people on that front.

Richard: You want to know what else I found out about Taylor Farms along those lines, Sonali? I think you’ll find it interesting. Going back to your article—in April 2024, Taylor Farms acquired FarmWise, an agricultural robotics company specializing in precision weeding and thinning.

So, the small farmers of America are supposed to compete with this robotic, industrial-scale operation that cuts corners every way it can—including, apparently, adequately cleaning fecal matter off its lettuce, since that’s the likely source of the cyclospora outbreak. And they’re supposed to compete with that. Meanwhile, many inner cities in this country—including the one where our studio is located here in D.C.—are food deserts. People there would be desperate for healthy, farm-grown food. But they can’t get it. The Trump administration—

And one of the other things you point out in the article, which I think is important, is that most people buying those organic-sounding brands—Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and so on—don’t realize they’re helping fund Trump’s MAGA super PAC. That’s something I learned from your article.

Sonali: Yes. Imagine that: a bag of lettuce helps the profit margins of a company that directly supports MAGA Inc., a Trump-related super PAC. This is what we’ve come to. There are people struggling with joblessness, immigrant farmworkers laboring in vulnerable conditions and being scapegoated—while the billionaire owners of these farms automate jobs, dismantle the regulatory apparatus meant to keep us safe, and funnel their profits into strengthening those same systems, getting richer and richer at the expense of our public health.

Something has to give. We have to push back hard against this system. That means breaking up food monopolies. It shouldn’t be that a handful of corporations control so much of our food production and distribution. We can’t survive without food. We shouldn’t be so dependent on a system this concentrated.

I draw an analogy to the war on Iran, which exposed the fragility of a globalized energy system where the majority of oil passes through one narrow geographic chokepoint. It took just one unprovoked war to throw global oil supplies into disarray. We have similar bottlenecks in our food distribution system because of these food monopolies. It’s a weakened system. When a handful of giants control so much of what we rely on, all it takes is one of them failin, or something going wrong with one of them, to throw huge parts of our food system into disarray.

So we have to dismantle these monopolies. We have to strengthen small farms and small farmers. We have to strengthen the regulatory apparatus that tracks infections and shuts them down quickly to keep us safe. These are simple solutions, but they go against the bottom lines of massive corporations and the MAGA agenda. It’s time for us to push back.

Richard: That’s so well said, and so important. Let me try to sum it up: what you’re describing is fragility. Whenever you have a highly centralized system like this, with just a few major players, a breakdown in any one of them paralyzes the whole system. People simply aren’t buying lettuce right now. It’s undemocratic. It exacerbates inequality. It feeds political corruption. It forecloses creative solutions to real problems. It contributes to unemployment.

Frankly, reading your article, I found myself feeling a little nostalgic for those partially true, partially mythic stories of ancient honor culture. I found myself imagining a world where Bruce Taylor—a third-generation inheritor of wealth, not unlike Donald Trump, and the CEO of Taylor Farms—would have felt he had no choice but to commit ritual suicide in the face of the harm he’s caused to so many people. Instead, as you point out, news recently emerged that representatives from Taylor Farms called the White House to try to delay a recall of their lettuce. They’re trying to sell more of this product even as it’s causing a horrific disease outbreak. What kind of person does something like that?

Sonali: It’s monstrous. And the fact that they felt bold enough to directly call the White House to hold off on a recall shows just how broken the system is. The government is supposed to be the watchdog, ensuring checks and balances on a private producer whose product can harm public health. Instead, they picked up the phone and called Trump directly—which, given who Trump is, shouldn’t surprise us. He likes having that kind of power. He likes people coming to kiss the ring, so to speak, and he likes being the one who determines what happens next.

The fact that Taylor Farms felt emboldened enough to ask the White House to stop a recall shows the sheer hubris built into our system for corporate players like this. It should never have come to this.

Richard: And they’re still mincing words with the government, even though the epidemiologists have been very clear it’s their lettuce that’s the problem. They’re still pretending otherwise, that it’s erroneous.

So let’s close with your final paragraph, if that’s all right, Sonali. You write that what will help prevent future outbreaks is restoring and expanding regulatory agencies’ ability to track infectious outbreaks, and breaking up food monopolies while sustaining and strengthening small farms. Then comes a line that may make people a little queasy, but you had to write it: the question is whether the federal government will have the guts to do what it takes to protect the American people’s guts. I think we already know the answer to that one, under current circumstances, don’t we?

Sonali: Yes—they do not have the guts to protect our guts. Which means we have to have the guts to take them on. It’s important for us to understand the power dynamic at work here. The government is supposed to work for us. And I think the solutions, as I mentioned earlier, really are simple. What matters is our ability to ensure that government is actually protecting us through these regulations.

This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Every single one of us, no matter our party, should be able to trust the food on our plate. And if we don’t trust the food on our plate, we should be asking: whose job is it to make sure our food is safe? You have the uber-libertarians, the Ayn Randians, who think the best government is no government at all. What are people supposed to do—set up a home chemistry lab to test their own lettuce for bacterial infections? Is everyone supposed to become an urban homesteader, growing their own lettuce, their own protein, everything themselves? We have to be able to rely on government to keep our food safe.

And I didn’t even get into the climate impacts of all this in the piece—that was outside its scope. But the practices of big agribusiness fuel climate change. A more dispersed food system, relying on small farmers, would use far less fossil-fuel-derived fertilizer and would align much better with better climate outcomes. And as the planet warms, parasitic infections become more likely, because these parasites thrive in a warming climate. All of these issues are tied together. And the solutions all involve pushing back against corporatism, big companies, and a weakened government.

Richard: And if we don’t do something about it, the only survivors in a few years might be Taylor Farms robot workers—like WALL-E, sifting through the wreckage. I don’t think that’s the future we want.

Sonali: It’s not even the future the billionaires want. They just haven’t thought it through. Right now, the vineyards of France are burning dangerously close to Bordeaux. In the billionaires’ bunkers, there will be no Bordeaux wine, because they will have destroyed the climate that produces it. If these people think they can secure a future for their own children while continuing the practices they’re engaged in, they’ve got another thing coming. You can’t have robots build the future for you that all of us, together, could build for one another.

Richard: No Pinot Noir: that’s hitting them where it hurts.