Keeping food safe requires robust regulation. But when we starve the agencies that enforce safety laws, the results can be sickening.
A bowl of salad. (Photo by Vladimir Srajber/ Pexels)
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When Costco slashed the prices for its bagged Taylor Farms salads in half this year, U.S. shoppers at the warehouse club retailer left piles of pre-cut kale salad, Mediterranean-style salad mix and others untouched, even though they were grown, processed and bagged in the United States.
Lettuce that had caused the largest-ever outbreak of Cyclospora in the country had instead been traced to iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico.
That five-month outbreak was declared over on 11 September. But it still has people in the United States questioning the safety of the food they buy, and whether the food supply as a whole is safe. It’s not just members of the general public who are asking. Former food safety officials say cuts made by the administration of President Donald Trump have worsened an already weak U.S. food safety system.
In her food safety blog, nutrition and food policy expert Marion Nestle wrote that lettuce producers had long known about the danger of Cyclospora. “They have not acted, and neither has the government,” she wrote.
In the months leading up to the Cyclospora outbreak, Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. focused instead on the dangers of processed food, boasted about restoring beef to the top of the U.S. diet and announced a ban on eight types of artificial food dye.
“This outbreak is remarkable, not only for the large number of people affected, but also because of the inadequate, delayed and chaotic oversight and response,” Nestle wrote.
Getting sick from food
While outbreaks of food-related illness are common, the response is usually orderly and managed by the government food and health agencies. In this case, the agencies were slow to respond and Taylor Food’s customer, Taco Bell, was initially blamed.
The confusion left state health departments to fill the information gap. Weeks went by before it became clear that a key source of the Cyclospora was lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms from of Mexico of the Cyclospora and not limited to lettuce consumed at Taco Bell.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported more than 12,800 cases in 21 states, with 570 people sick enough to have been hospitalized. Cyclospora can cause severe diarrhea and stomach cramps. Eye-popping headlines described “explosive diarrhea.”
So who can people trust to keep their food safe, and how can they know when to avoid bagged salads, ice cream or burgers?
Food safety is managed by three agencies in the United States: the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It’s a different structure from Europe, which has a single European Food Safety Authority.
Starving the food regulators
In his second term, Trump gutted these agencies and rejigged their priorities, former top officials say. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency run by billionaire Elon Musk, for example, laid off some 3,500 people from the FDA and another 1,600 people from the CDC. But they were all badly understaffed long before that.
Susan Mayne, a former head of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition who now teaches Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, told a recent seminar that the U.S. food safety system has been “resource-deprived” for decades. By resource-deprived, she means far too few people and far too little funding to do the job.
After several nationwide outbreaks of foodborne illness, including a 2006 outbreak of E. coli in spinach that killed three people and made at least 200 sick, the U.S. Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011. It required more testing, training and monitoring of hygiene at farms, as well as inspections of foreign sites.
But agencies have never fully met the tough requirements. Implementation of a rule that is supposed to make it easier to trace outbreaks like this one has been delayed again and again to make things easier for industry. This year it was delayed another two years.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan research group that reports to Congress, estimates that each year the FDA conducts around 8,300 domestic inspections and some 900 foreign inspections. It was supposed to be making more than 19,000 foreign inspections a year.
The FDA has 420 food safety inspectors to make all of these inspections.
“The FDA is responsible for 275,000 food facilities and half of those are outside our borders,” Mayne said. She said the Taylor Farms facility suspected to have been the source of the Cyclospora outbreak had not been inspected in the last six years.
When self-regulation doesn’t work
USDA research into Cyclospora was effectively shut down by funding cuts this year. Most food safety is left to the industry, with the understanding that companies won’t want to damage their own businesses by selling products that hurt their customers.
It’s often no mystery where the germs come from. An outbreak of E. coli in romaine lettuce in 2018 that killed five people and made at least 210 sick in 36 states was traced to manure-contaminated irrigation water in fields in the U.S. state of Arizona.
Contaminated food is a common problem in the United States. For years, the CDC has estimated that infected food makes 48 million Americans sick every year. Around 3,000 die and another 128,000 become sick enough to be hospitalized.
“People feel a loss of trust right now,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist who writes a newsletter on epidemiology and who is an adjunct professor at Yale. A Gallup poll released late in 2026 confirmed this impression.
It found just 11% of Americans polled had a great deal of confidence the federal government could ensure food safety and just 36% had a fair amount of confidence. “For the first time, a majority of Americans have not much (32%) or no confidence at all (21%) in the government to ensure food safety,” Gallup said.
Short-term safety and long-term harm
When consumers lose faith in fresh food, they turn to processed food — perceived as safer in the short term, even if it’s less healthy in the long term, several experts agreed.
“Produce sales are way down this summer and fields of lettuce are now being plowed under. Sales of produce are falling,” Mayne said.
It’s a predictable response, even if it’s not a logical one, said Jetelina. “Humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk,” she said. “They often fear unlikely threats the most.”
But Mayne said people can reduce their risk of being made sick by the food they eat. It requires getting information from the right sources, she said.
“Be aware of recalls,” she advised. “Make sure you know what recalls are happening.” That can be a big job. The FDA often lists several recalls a day on its website.
Restoring the public’s trust
People most at risk from foodborne illnesses such as listeria, salmonella or E. coli include immunocompromised patients, the elderly, children and pregnant women. They need to keep a more careful eye out for food contamination, Mayne said, and to be aware of high-risk foods, such as dairy products.
Meats should be thoroughly cooked, and everyone should follow what she called high-quality news media, which will be more likely to carry well-sourced reports about major food recalls.
Large food companies often mix products at distribution centers, increasing the likelihood of spreading contamination, noted Dr. Anne Zink, former chief medical officer for the state of Alaska, who is now a fellow at Yale’s school of public health. “Eat fresh, eat local,” she advised.
Some solutions may sound simple, such as one from Nestle, recommending mandates that irrigation water be decontaminated. But Mayne said that while this sounds like a logical solution, in real life, it doesn’t always work.
“Cyclospora is a parasite and is resistant to chlorine, for example,” Mayne said in a post on social media in response to Nestle’s comment. Chlorination is a common method for decontaminating water.
The FDA says it has a new plan for preventing Cyclospora outbreaks, but it’s not detailed. Taylor Farms says it will stop producing iceberg lettuce in Mexico from May to August, when the parasite is more likely to propagate in water.
Advocates say more is needed. In a letter to the FDA, Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports and a former deputy undersecretary of food safety at the USDA, said that the FDA needs to address systemic problems, improve communication and strengthen regulatory enforcement if the government and the food industry wants to restore the public’s trust.
Questions to consider:
1. What do food regulators do?
2. What are some ways food can get contaminated before it reaches a food market?
3. How can you tell where the food that is currently in your refrigerator originally came from?
Maggie Fox has been reporting on health and science for more than 30 years and is currently host of the One World, One Health podcast. She has covered conflict, politics and other international events from London, Hong Kong and Beirut. She has covered the Covid pandemic, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, stem cell technology, vaccine controversies and other stories for Reuters, CNN, National Journal, Medscape, STAT and NBC News. She lives outside Washington, D.C.