I laid out eight things last Friday morning on FSN that Washington should have done about Cyclospora. The obvious objection to a list like that is money — that food safety is expensive, that budgets are finite, that somebody has to pay for it. I want to take that objection seriously, because when you actually put the numbers side by side, it collapses. The eight things are cheap. What happened instead is not.
Start with what the federal government itself says this parasite costs. USDA’s Economic Research Service publishes a cost-of-foodborne-illness estimate covering thirty-one pathogens. Cyclospora cayetanensis is one of them, and its line reads: 11,407 cases a year, $464.63 per case, $5.3 million a year for the entire United States.
The Microbiological Data Program, which tested about fifteen thousand produce samples a year — bagged lettuce and spinach, cilantro, hot peppers, tomatoes, sprouts, melons — and accounted for something like eighty percent of all federal produce pathogen testing until it was shut down in December 2012. It cost $4.5 million a year. The entire national testing program cost less than what one parasite costs the country annually, and I have been asking for it back since 2024.
Four things are wrong with the $5.3 million. First, the 11,407 is Elaine Scallan’s 2011 figure, unchanged — ERS’s dollar estimate is riding on a 15-year-old case count. Second, ERS says plainly on its own page that these numbers are conservative because they exclude willingness to pay to prevent non-financial harm, including pain and suffering. For an illness that relapses in waves across weeks, that is most of the injury. Third, they exclude industry losses entirely. No restaurant sales. No lettuce. No recall. And fourth, they do not contain a dollar of what it costs to fight about any of it.
Then it produces a summer like this one. The fifty-state count on Friday afternoon was 21,452 people, which is 1.88 times ERS’s estimate of every Cyclospora case in a normal year. Run only the counted cases at ERS’s own per-case cost and you get $9.97 million — already nearly double the agency’s entire annual national figure. Run the Scallan-adjusted estimate of 557,352 illnesses and you get $259 million. Both are floors, because neither includes a dollar of what follows.
Here is what follows. Yum Brands reported Thursday that Taco Bell’s US same-store sales are down 2 percent for the third quarter through July 27. Its stock has fallen roughly five to eight percent since the chain was linked to the outbreak. On July 17, the first Friday after the link became public, Taco Bell’s foot traffic fell about sixteen times worse than the broader fast-food category, which was down 1.9 percent that day.
And the damage did not stop at the company with the lettuce. Chopt was down 12 percent in traffic as of July 23. Sweetgreen’s weekly spending fell ten percentage points against last year across the first half of July. Sweetgreen has said its food is not linked to this outbreak, and no state has tied an illness to either chain. They lost the money anyway. Grocery shoppers are buying less lettuce, and some large buyers have stopped sourcing from central Mexico altogether.
Go one step further back and it reaches the grocery store. Stew Leonard’s runs eight stores across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and its chief executive told CBS News that lettuce sales are down about 11 percent and that there is “a lot of confusion on store floors right now.” Behind that anecdote is the scanner data: NielsenIQ recorded US fresh lettuce unit sales in the week ending July 18 down 9 percent from the week before and 19 percent from two weeks before.
And one step further back still, to the growers. Paul Sellew founded Little Leaf Farms, which grows lettuce in the eastern United States — not Mexico, not Salinas, no connection to Taylor Farms or to any recalled product. His sales are down by double digits. His account: “The consumer has been motivated by fear.” He also says the entire fresh produce category at retail is down. A grower two thousand miles from Guanajuato is paying for Guanajuato.
The trade associations have said very little about any of this, and one of them said something more useful than it may have intended. The National Restaurant Association now tells its members that washing produce under clean running water “cannot guarantee removal of the parasite.” That is the restaurant industry’s own trade group putting in writing exactly what the White House press secretary told the country to do on July 16, and it joins FDA’s guidance document and CDC’s health advisory in saying so. Three sources. One of them had every commercial reason to say something else. What no trade association has done, more than six weeks in, is put a number on what any of this has cost its members.
One publication did say something useful this week, and it came from a direction that carries more weight than mine. On Friday the editorial board of the Delmarva Farmer, a paper written for the people who grow this food, called for exactly the traceability infrastructure that has been shelved. Its account of the harm is better than the one I have been making. Food moves in hours while outbreak investigations take weeks, and in that gap, retailers turn cautious, buyers hesitate, whole commodity sectors watch sales fall, and growers who followed every protocol lose their market because they happen to raise the same crop as the eventual suspect. Its prescription is electronic purchase records, standardized lot coding, interoperable supply-chain databases and real-time data sharing — which is the contents of FSMA 204, described by a farm paper without the rule’s name attached to it. It observes that agriculture has spent billions over two decades on water testing, worker training, sanitation and third-party audits, and argues those investments deserve to be matched by equally modern systems for detection and traceback. It closes by saying it is “time for the public health infrastructure that protects it to catch up.”
That fourth exclusion is the one I know best, because it is my job. The ERS figure holds nothing for what Taylor Farms will spend defending these cases — the lawyers, the experts, the document review, the depositions, the years of it. It holds nothing for what my side spends building them. And it holds nothing for what eventually reaches the person who was sick. Look at what the money is paying for. It is paying for precisely the pain and suffering that ERS declined to value and said so. The tort system puts a price on the one term the cost-of-illness model leaves deliberately blank. The two numbers are not in conflict; one of them is measuring the part the other refused to measure.
The legal fees are money spent establishing who is responsible for something that should not have happened, which buys nobody a single healthy day. And there is a hard public number for it. After the 1993 outbreak, Jack in the Box sued its own meat suppliers and recovered about $58.5 million. Its annual report to the SEC records that roughly $45.8 million of that was left after litigation costs. Nearly $13 million dollars, consumed by one recovery action arising out of one outbreak, and not one cent of it made anybody well. That is a line-item ERS does not have, and it recurs in every outbreak, on both sides, every time.
As for scale, my first case is still the clearest illustration I have. Brianne Kiner spent forty-two days in a coma and more than five months in the hospital, and her case settled for $15.6 million in 1995. One child. One settlement. Nearly three times what the federal government today says Cyclospora costs the entire United States in a year. I am not suggesting cyclosporiasis is that illness, and it is not — Brianne lost most of her colon and has been diabetic ever since. The comparison is not about what a case is worth. It is about the distance between what the tort system finds when it looks at one injured person and what a federal cost model finds when it looks at a whole country. Those two systems are not measuring the same thing, and only one of them is used to decide whether a $4.5 million testing program is worth restoring.
We do have a measured figure for the last comparable event. Spalding and Sexton, in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, put the total societal loss from the November 2018 romaine outbreak at $276 to $343 million. Their own conclusion is the argument I am making: the episode demonstrates the economic benefit of adopting mandatory food-safety standards and improved traceability. For 2006 spinach, USDA’s retail scanner work found $60.6 million in lost consumer grocery spending on all fresh leafy greens over the following 15 months, and packaged spinach sales were still off about twenty percent a year later.
When the agency proposed pushing the FSMA 204 compliance date from January 2026 to July 2028, it had to run a regulatory impact analysis. That analysis is in the Federal Register, and its arithmetic is not ambiguous. The benefits of the delay are up to a negative $322 million a year. Those are the public health benefits the country gives up by waiting. The cost savings on the other side — what industry keeps by not having to comply yet run about $73 million. This is not my number, and it is not an advocacy group’s number. It is the agency’s own table, in the Federal Register, under the heading Summary of Benefits, Costs, and Distributional Effects.
The second detail is the signature. The proposed rule is signed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Eleven months later the same Secretary told reporters that this outbreak was under control, at a moment when the count was 1,644 in five states. It is now 21,452 across fifty. I do not say he caused it. I say the traceability rule that would have shortened the traceback carries his signature on the paper that delayed it, and that the paper itself says the delay loses money.
On one side: a memorandum, a reporting requirement, some state code, $4.5 million a year, and a rule that is already law. On the other side: a parasite the government prices at $5.3 million a year that has already produced $9.97 million of counted illness by the government’s own per-case figure and plausibly $259 million once you adjust for the cases nobody counted; a comparable produce outbreak measured at $276 to $343 million; a fast-food chain down two percent and its stock down as much as eight; two salad chains with no link to anything down 10 percent and 12 percent; and a delay the agency itself scored as a net loss of nearly forty million dollars a year.
Food safety is not expensive. Outbreaks are expensive. We have spent this summer proving it again, at the expense of 21,452 people who did not get a vote, and at the expense of a great many businesses that did nothing wrong except sell lettuce.
