According to https://futurism.com/science-energy/diarrhea-lettuce-taylor-...
Taylor Farms is "heavily involved in modern-day forced labor."
They contract labor out from AZ Dept of Corrections for $4.75 / hr (but inmates are capped at $1.50 / hr in AZ)
Some of the incarcerated workers were here as non-citizens, detained by ICE, and only then eligible for work / slavery.
2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
Completely anecdotal, I see lots or recalls from smaller producers I’ve never heard of, I can imagine they have less scrutiny and oversight.
Not only is the blast radius smaller, but small businesses are less incentivized to cut corners since serious violations pose a greater risk to their business than large businesses. Corruption is essentially legalized in America via lobbying, but only big companies can really afford to lobby and make huge campaign contributions to sway the government in their favor.
Government is meant to be a check on businesses, but that completely falls down once business is big enough to buy the government. It wouldn't surprise me if quality control at large companies is worse for the simple fact that they know who to pay off if they get caught, as Taylor Farms has here.
The United States has allowed many industries to consolidate, but the fines they face when they mess up are infinitely small compared to their size.
“The only social responsibility of the government is to increase campaign sponsor’s profits”
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
Food packaged and distributed by these mega-suppliers probably has less human handling through the supply chain than any other food, and they have lot numbers and sources logged for all of it, which allowed them to quickly pinpoint the farm that was the source of the Cyclospora outbreak.
There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it.
Bubba flipping burgers getting his dirty hands on your meal might make you sick, but Bobba inspecting the meatslop production line with constant pressure from upper management to be as efficient as possible according to whatever recent regulations were stripped back might accidentally spray the horse-meat product decontaminizer on the pig-meat product, generating a national pandemic.
If an individual farm has an outbreak they can (usually) source it, eliminate it from the supply chain, and switch to an alternative without any interruption to service. That also means you want as large of a geographic distribution of your farm network as possible. (I'm looking at you, Yuma Valley - a semi-regular source of e.coli outbreaks).
As a bonus, the supply chain is much more efficient at this scale. Small farms can have their salads packed in nitrogen filled bags for longer shelf life and less waste.
Fresh leafy greens are naturally just one of the toughest and most vulnerable supply chains. The disappointing answer (like in a lot of these situations) is that being bigger and more massive company is what makes the product better.
Number of times the lettuce I grew at home this year made me shit a tsunami: 0
Number of times lettuce I bought at the store this year made me shit a tsunami: 1
So facility risk seems similar or higher for the local shop, depending on specific people running it, but animal-bourne risk seems higher at the packing plant, which seems to be the more likely vector to me anyways.
Consolidation's only benefit is shifting the fiscal gain into fewer pockets, which comes with it's own perverse incentives. (See the Boeing/Airbus duopoly and the problems that causes.)
The jist is that a lot of this is from consolidation at all levels. There are fewer grocery stores and distributors which has ultimately made hard to know where food ultimately comes from.
Couple that with deregulation and the dismantling of the government regulatory agencies under DOGE and we get what we have.
(That's what makes this recent outbreak so atypical - either there was a massive screw up or someone is hiding something).
People also are not aware that the US has (or at least had) one of the most meticulous food inspection regimes in the world. Agency inspectors actually drop in and inspect facilities regularly. The EU might have more stringent food regulations, but as a reminder people were able to slip horse meat into the beef supply for decades before being caught - something like that would be inconceivable in the US.
With appropriate regulation and enforcement I agree with you, but in the current regime, I’m not surprised that foodborne illness in America has 10x in 2026.
With the elevated standards of megascale agriculture you have the issue now where diseases from a lettuce farm in Mexico could affect somebody's health in NYC a month later in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in a previous era.
There's no complete solution but in this particular case it's important to remember that salads are actually pretty serious foodborne—illness vectors and they need to be heavily rinsed and ideally cleaned with a bleach or vinegar solution. It's one of the reasons that salads are traditionally on the no-eat list for pregnant women.
pstuart•54m ago
My armchair assessment is the best way to push back is for farmers to join together into co-ops and find a middle ground between the efficiency of scale and the concerns of food safety and ethical working conditions.
bix6•50m ago
cyanydeez•43m ago
lenerdenator•33m ago
We're working against the desire to get the basic needs of life (in this case, food) met for the lowest possible price.
cyanydeez•17m ago
zer00eyz•26m ago
Today, if it was a mandate you could slap a label on every vegetable and track it back to the field it was grown.
I think most Americans would be shocked as to where their food comes from.
I suspect that a lot of Whole Foods shoppers would be a bit miffed to find out that the lettuce in their salad kit also ends up on a macdonalds burger.
Everyone is invested in maintaining the illusion. And that collision is rampant across all of food: Pepsi price fixing with Walmart, the price of beef at retail being long decoupled from wholesale / Agri Stats...
parineum•7m ago