This past Saturday, I went to a birthday dinner at Olive Garden. I was looking forward to a normal amount of pasta, and maybe some salad with that really good Olive Garden dressing on it. However, as we went around the table giving our orders, a few of our dinner companions reminded us that lettuce is, at the moment, bad. It will give you explosive diarrhea. Everyone quickly opted for soup instead.
As we chatted over the dinner, I mentioned having eaten Taco Bell (including a Doritos Locos taco with lettuce on it) several days prior. Everyone immediately told me, half-jokingly, that they’d check back in with me in a week (the lettuce poop disease has a long incubation period).
Then, today, the news shifted: lettuce is now…maybe fine? But also probably not?
Last week, we wrote about how investigators looking into the cyclospora parasite outbreak had seemingly traced the infection back to Taco Bell, and more specifically, Taco Bell’s lettuce supplier, Taylor Farms. At the time, Taco Bell announced it was pulling “all affected Taylor Farms lettuce” from its stores. Not long after, Taylor Farms instituted a recall in 27 states. However, chaos continued to reign, as Taylor Farms’ recall announcement listed a bunch of lettuce and salad products only by brand code, which average people who buy stuff from stores don’t tend to memorize. As a result, there remained a significant amount of confusion over which salad products were problematic. For instance, at the Olive Garden dinner, could we eat the salad? Their salad also apparently comes from Taylor Farms, and we’re in one of the states with confirmed infections. At least the pasta was safe.
Then, yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration came out and said that the test they had done on Taylor Farms lettuce revealing that it was the offending vegetable passing around cyclospora was in fact a false positive. But it also says it’s still investigating Taylor Farms as the source of the outbreak. Meanwhile, Taylor Farms is crowing about no longer being officially implicated, while it issues a voluntary recall on its products.
Notably, Taylor Farms made a large donation to a Trump-aligned super PAC just days before a new regulation intended to help companies and health officials trace foodborne illnesses more quickly took effect. That regulation was pushed back, and now doesn’t effect until 2028. Who can say if this means anything!
So like, can we eat Taco Bell or not? On one hand, basically everyone involved here is corrupt and/or lying to cover their own asses, so I think it’s pretty likely that Taylor Farms is indeed the source of the cyclospora. On the other hand, there’s been so much confusion around all this and there’s so little trust right now in the government to get things right, that I also would fully believe this was a screw-up. People in the U.S. already tend to (jokingly or no) associate Mexican food with stomach issues, and it would not shock me if this administration tried to play directly into that. Taco Bell isn’t the one growing the lettuce with the cyclospora on it, after all.
It seems like the best bet right now is just to…stop eating leaves? And berries apparently also? Doesn’t seem like a healthy way to continue on. Good thing our government cares a lot about food safety and is actively supporting attempts to track and eradicate problems such as this one, right?