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# Publisher’s Platform: California Lettuce Was Never Implicated. California Growers Plowed Under a Third of the Crop Anyway. Here Is What the Trade Associations, Washington and the Rest of Us Can Actually Do About It.
- URL: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/08/publishers-platform-california-lettuce-was-never-implicated-california-growers-plowed-under-a-third-of-the-crop-anyway-here-is-what-the-trade-associations-washington-and-the-rest-of-us-/
- Published: 2026-08-19T13:07:04.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-19T13:07:04.000Z
- Description: Fix the finding and one farm takes the loss instead of ninety percent of the lettuce. Do that and you put me out of the fresh fruit and vegetable business, and I would go gladly.
- Author: Bill Marler
- Tags: Opinion & Contributed Articles

The California Farm Bureau published a piece by Caleb Hampton this morning and it says the quiet part plainly. [California lettuce was never implicated in this outbreak](https://www.agalert.com/california-ag-news/archives/august-19-2026/cyclospora-fallout-hits-california-farmers/?ref=foodsafetynews.com). The recall covered seventeen days of shredded iceberg from one Taylor Farms facility in Guanajuato. Mexico ships very little lettuce north in the summer. Nearly all of it comes off the Central Coast, and the Central Coast is where the loss landed.

Growers destroyed about a third of the lettuce standing ready to harvest. Dick Peixoto of Lakeside Organic Gardens in Watsonville told Ag Alert that his farm has about as much to do with Taylor Farms bagged salads as it does with Oscar Mayer wieners, and he spent the past few weeks laying off harvest crews and plowing his lettuce under anyway. Ryan Kelly at Boutonnet Farms in Salinas says the collapse has erased his entire profit margin for the year and cancelled his October orders. The Salinas vegetable season draws tens of thousands of people into harvesting, processing and trucking, and Kelly says it is going to be very painful for that community.

The measured version. Iceberg sales fell 25.4 percent and prepacked salads 34.2 percent between July 18 and August 8, with all fresh produce down 9.9 percent and strawberries, blackberries and raspberries down 14.7, 16.4 and 28.1 percent. Berries have nothing to do with this outbreak. Dave Puglia of Western Growers says the early speculation landed on them anyway. California lettuce sales were about $3.7 billion in 2024.

I have written this before, under the title [Reap What You Sow](https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/07/publishers-platform-reap-what-you-sow/). Traceability is not a tax on the innocent. It is the only thing that protects them. When you can name the grower in a day, one farm takes the loss. When you cannot, the whole category takes it. You cannot lobby away the pathogen. You can only lobby away the ability to find it, and when you succeed you do not stop being blamed. You just lose the evidence that would have cleared you.

The growers in this piece say it is the worst crisis of consumer confidence since the 2006 spinach outbreak, and 2006 is the right comparison, because 2006 produced the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement: voluntary, covering virtually all of California commercial production, with food safety rules, mandatory audits and, in its own words, traceback and recall protocols. Growers built that themselves, unbidden, because they understood after 2006 that reputation in this business is collective. Then other parts of the industry [asked Congress to push the federal version to 2028](https://www.marlerblog.com/case-news/who-asked-congress-to-delay-the-food-traceability-rule-their-own-filings-name-them-and-the-members-who-wrote-the-bill-sit-on-the-subcommittee-that-funds-the-fda/?ref=foodsafetynews.com) and got a funding prohibition that stops FDA from enforcing a rule that is already law, [fifteen and a half years](https://www.marlerblog.com/case-news/congress-told-the-fda-to-write-the-food-traceability-rule-by-january-2013-enforcement-now-begins-in-july-2028-here-is-how-fifteen-and-a-half-years-went-by/?ref=foodsafetynews.com) after Congress ordered it written.

Here is the opening. Puglia says the outbreak showed there is a need to open the doors wider and give consumers greater visibility into the food safety practices and standards the industry has developed. I agree with him and I am going to take him at his word. His own organization has De Ann Davis on the record saying Western Growers supports the traceability rule, and [Joelle Mosso on the record](https://www.marlerblog.com/case-news/joelle-mosso-wants-better-risk-communication-the-fastest-way-to-get-it-is-the-food-traceability-rule-that-got-pushed-to-2028/?ref=foodsafetynews.com) asking for better risk communication. Three voices, one association, one door.

One disclosure. My firm represents people sickened in this outbreak and we have filed cases naming Taylor Farms entities as defendants. You should know where I sit.

Let me end somewhere better than where I usually do. I made a version of this list in July and [a longer one on the seventh of this month](https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/08/publishers-platform-i-have-been-told-i-am-too-hard-on-industry-and-on-the-government-here-are-fifteen-things-fda-and-cdc-could-do-about-cyclospora/), and I am going to make it again, because the *Cyclospora* season is not over.

**The trade associations.** This is the ask I most want heard, because you can move tomorrow without anyone’s permission. LGMA wrote traceback and recall protocols into a voluntary agreement in 2007 and has said almost nothing publicly since the middle of July. Say something. Say that the federal rule your members already largely satisfy should take effect on the original schedule and put a *Cyclospora* specific water standard into the metrics instead of waiting for FDA. The International Fresh Produce Association went on the record against the delays and should repeat that to the appropriations subcommittee, in writing, by name. Western Growers has three officers pointing the same way and should make it association policy. The Food Industry Association and the National Grocers Association applauded the delay; the category you were protecting just lost a third of a crop, and withdrawing that ask would cost you nothing but the admission. The National Restaurant Association already tells its own members that washing cannot guarantee removal of this parasite, which is an argument for finding the lot faster, and it should say so where it counts.

**Growers, shippers and buyers.** Treat the water and validate the treatment against the right organism. The leafy greens metrics [already require](https://www.wga.com/news/new-water-management-standards-for-leafy-greens/?ref=foodsafetynews.com) growers using surface water for overhead irrigation to treat it within 21 days of harvest, but the treatment is scored against generic *E. coli*, and FDA says in [its own voice](https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/cyclosporiasis-and-fresh-produce?ref=foodsafetynews.com) that chlorine does not work against *Cyclospora* and that indicator testing will not find it. Add human specific markers so you know when human waste is in your irrigation source. Build the lot level records now rather than in 2028; Kroger already told its suppliers to be ready, and any large buyer can require traceability by contract tomorrow morning without help from Congress. Extend field sanitation to every crew, not only operations with eleven or more hand laborers. And publish the audit results, which was Puglia’s idea, not mine.

**FDA and CDC.** Name *Cyclospora* in the agricultural water rule, where the only numeric microbial criterion in [Subpart E](https://www.fda.gov/media/164540/download?ref=foodsafetynews.com) is generic *E. coli*. Finish the internal product tracing system Section 204 ordered built in 2011 and that GAO reported in January still does not exist. Fund validated detection methods, because nearly every inactivation study in the literature rides on a surrogate organism. Put this organism on the [National Wastewater Surveillance System](https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/?ref=foodsafetynews.com) panel, which already draws on about 1,500 sites and does not include it. Restore the reporting that [became optional on July 1, 2025](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-quietly-scaled-back-surveillance-program-foodborne-illnesses-rcna227089?ref=foodsafetynews.com). And keep this month’s changes: the new section on the clusters nobody can explain, and the epidemiologic curve, are real improvements.

**Public health, and the people who actually do this work.** State and local agencies perform about half of all food processing facility inspections, ninety percent of produce safety inspections and every retail inspection in this country, and they are also the ones who pick up the phone and ask a sick person what they ate. Michigan interviewed more than 2,900 people to get where it got. Attribution in this outbreak is built out of interviews and nothing else, which means the speed of the answer is a direct function of how many people are available to ask the question. On July 1, 2025, the national surveillance network went from eight pathogens to two, and *Cyclospora* was one of the six dropped. Twelve months later the largest outbreak of it in American history began. The first illness started on June 14 and the food was not named until July 17, and every week in that gap was a week of product still moving. Fund the surveillance, fund the state and local investigators, and fund the labs behind them. Faster work is not a nicety here. It is the difference between a cluster and thirty thousand people.

**And one structural thing.** When it is over, somebody has to be able to say why it happened. Frank Yiannas has been arguing for an independent board, modeled on the one that investigates airplane crashes, to find the root cause of foodborne outbreaks and publish it. [I have written about why he is right](https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2026/08/publishers-platform-frank-yiannas-wants-an-independent-board-to-investigate-foodborne-outbreaks-set-the-airplanes-aside-fda-wrote-the-right-recommendation-about-this-lettuce-in-2013-and/), and about the part of it that has nothing to do with airplanes. In 2013 FDA investigated this same parasite at this same facility in this same growing region, and wrote the correct recommendation: find out whether *Cyclospora* is a reasonably likely hazard there, and if it is, re-evaluate the wash step. Nobody was ever assigned to answer it. Thirteen years later we are here again, and the reason is not that the investigators did poor work. It is that there was no addressee, no clock and nobody tracking whether anything happened next.

**Congress.** Strike the funding prohibition. The rule exists and is law; Congress has simply forbidden the agency to spend a dollar enforcing it until the summer of 2028\. Fund the sequencing that would let investigators tell one cluster from another. And rebuild something like the Microbiological Data Program, which cost about five million dollars a year, ran 120,887 samples in 42 states and triggered 23 produce recalls in its last two years before it was zeroed out in 2012\. That is the cheapest trip wire this industry will ever be offered.

**Consumers.** I am not going to tell you to wash your lettuce harder, because it does not work. The useful things are different. If you have had watery diarrhea for more than a few days, see a doctor and ask for a stool test or a gastrointestinal panel, because most of these cases are never confirmed and an outbreak is only as visible as the tests somebody ordered. If a health department calls, answer every question about what you ate, because attribution here is built out of interviews and nothing else. And ask your grocer who grew it. People are already doing that at farmers markets, paying a premium for traceability while Washington defunds the rule that would supply it.

**Final Ask.** One more thing that is not on any list, for the people in government and industry who make these decisions. Sit down with a family whose child spent the summer in a hospital. It changes what the numbers mean.

None of this requires anyone to admit fault. It requires treating the ability to find the source as insurance rather than expense, because the growers who plowed under a third of their crop this month were insured by nothing at all. Fix the finding and one farm takes the loss instead of ninety percent of the lettuce. Do that and you put me out of the fresh fruit and vegetable business, and I would go gladly.