The International Fresh Produce Association’s Global Produce & Floral Show opens in Orlando this week. I am not on the program. I have one request for the people who are, the same one I made of the beef industry twenty-four years ago: put me out of business. Please.
Two pleas, two industries
On August 4, 2002, after ConAgra recalled more than 19 million pounds of ground beef, I wrote an op-ed asking the beef industry for four things: sample the meat, give the government mandatory recall authority, keep lot records, and put one agency in charge.
On March 1, 2006, I made the lettuce industry the same offer. FDA had just issued its fresh-cut produce guidance after the August 2005 Dole bagged lettuce E. coli outbreak, the fourth such outbreak in four years. My asks were simpler: stop irrigating with water contaminated by cattle and human feces, wash the product, give field and plant workers toilets and handwashing, and keep sick workers home. I closed with a line I still stand by: with a little luck, it would force one damn trial lawyer to find another line of work.
Six months later, bagged baby spinach from the Salinas Valley sickened more than 200 people in 26 states, put 104 in the hospital, gave 31 of them kidney failure and killed five. The outbreak strain turned up in cattle and wild pig feces on a ranch under a mile from the field. My firm represented seventy-six of the sick, including the families of the five who died. Luck never showed up.
On February 28, 2007, five months after spinach, I said it to their faces. The Ag Forum invited me to lunch at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas: standing room only, $35 a plate, spinach salad, a CNN crew in the back. I told the growers to look at what the meat industry had done after Jack in the Box and copy it, and I asked them, please, to put me out of business. They applauded. The outbreaks kept coming.
What beef did with the request
It did not do all four things. It did enough. It started in September 1994, when FSIS Administrator Michael Taylor told the American Meat Institute that raw ground beef carrying any E. coli O157:H7 was adulterated and would be recalled. The industry sued to stop him; a federal court in Texas upheld the policy that December, in a case I still call my favorite. After 2002 the rest followed: trim tested before it went into the grinder, product held until the result came back, interventions on the carcass, and in 2011 six more Shiga toxin-producing serogroups declared adulterants. Federal ground beef samples positive for O157:H7 fell from 0.86 percent in 2000 to 0.17 percent in 2004.
My firm’s hamburger E. coli cases ran from Jack in the Box in 1993 to ConAgra in 2002, and today they are close to zero. Not zero; I have a ground beef kofta case in San Diego as I write this. Close. It is the best thing that has happened in food safety in my lifetime, and the industry that sued over the adulterant rule is the one that made it work.
What leafy greens did with the request
After spinach, the industry built something real. Western Growers wrote metrics, California and Arizona created the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements in 2007 and put signatories under state audit, and the industry seeded the Center for Produce Safety. I have said so in print, and I have sued LGMA members. The outbreaks did not stop. CDC counted 40 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli outbreaks linked to leafy greens between 2009 and 2018: 1,212 illnesses, 77 cases of HUS and eight deaths, more than half of them romaine. Leafy greens are the second most common source of foodborne E. coli O157 outbreaks. The first was ground beef, and look where its trend line went.
Yuma, 2018: 210 sick in 36 states, 96 hospitalized, 27 with HUS, five dead, and the outbreak strain in an irrigation canal past a feedlot with room for 100,000 head. The LGMAs tripled the feedlot buffer to 1,200 feet. Salinas, 2019: 167 sick, 85 hospitalized, 15 with HUS. Fall 2020: 40 sick, and the outbreak strain in cattle feces uphill from the fields.
November 2024: 89 sick in 15 states, 36 hospitalized, seven with HUS, one dead, traced through a single processor to a single grower. FDA closed the file in February 2025 without a word to the public; NBC News and a stack of records named Taylor Farms and the grower. Four of the seven with kidney failure are my clients. This summer: 12,883 Cyclospora illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths from shredded iceberg lettuce, the largest of its kind in American history, with the parasite found in a wastewater tank at the plant and a ditch at a grower. On September 10, FDA closed a fourteen-person romaine E. coli O157:H7 file and named no grower, no processor and no state.
Twenty years after spinach, leafy greens are still having the argument beef finished in 1994.
The beef playbook, translated into lettuce
Test the raw material before it goes in the grinder. In beef a positive means a recall, so plants test trim, hold the lot and ship on a negative. A pathogen on lettuce eaten raw is adulteration too; nobody is required to look. For lettuce the grinder is the field and the shredder: test the water for the parasite rather than a bacterial stand-in, test product before it ships, and hold it for the result. The industry says a pathogen on lettuce is a needle in a haystack. Beef said the same thing in 1994. In 2010, federal sampling found 29 positives in 11,616 ground beef samples. Every needle was found.
Keep the cattle away from the food. Beef puts hide washes and steam between the animal and the meat. In lettuce the animal is next door, and the buffer is a trade association metric no feedlot owner ever signed. Enforceable setbacks between feedlots and the fields and canals that serve them, and a right for FDA to walk onto an implicated feedlot and sample, as my draft citizen petition asks.
Trace the lot. Since 2016 every beef grinder, plant or grocery store, keeps a log. Congress ordered FDA to write the produce equivalent in 2011; FDA finished it in 2022, pushed compliance to July 2028, and Congress wrote the delay into law last November. The industry says it wants the rule. Tell the appropriations committees, in writing, and comply now.
Name the plant and publish where the product went. When a beef lot tests positive, USDA names the plant and, since 2008, publishes the list of stores that received it. In 2024 a romaine outbreak killed someone and FDA named nobody; in 2026 it did it again. My two other draft petitions ask FDA to name implicated firms and to publish retail consignee lists in every Class I recall. The industry should sign them, because an unnamed outbreak is a category-wide outbreak, and every honest grower pays for it.
Put someone in charge and pay for it. A federal inspector stands in every slaughterhouse every day it runs. For produce, the only federal program that sampled it, USDA’s Microbiological Data Program, cost about $5 million a year, triggered 23 recalls in 2010 and 2011, and was zeroed out in 2012 with the produce lobby pushing. On July 1, 2025, CDC dropped Cyclospora from FoodNet. Rebuild the trip wire, put the parasite back on the count, and fund the state labs that found this summer’s outbreak.
The economics
One of my three degrees is in economics, so let me put it that way. The 2018 Yuma outbreak, 210 people, cost the industry an estimated $276 million to $343 million. This summer lettuce unit sales fell 19 percent in two weeks; Western Growers’ chief executive told the New York Times the drop neared 30 percent, with millions of heads of healthy California lettuce plowed under. California grew none of the outbreak lettuce. A positive test and a named grower cost one company one season. An unnamed outbreak costs every grower in the country. The beef industry learned that a recall with a name on it is cheaper than a category without one. That is the whole lesson, and it took beef about a decade.
Put me out of the leafy green business
Bruce Taylor’s October 8 letter says Taylor Farms will stop harvesting iceberg lettuce in central Mexico during Cyclospora season and join a task force with FDA. Good. One company, one product, one region. The beef industry did not fix hamburger one plant at a time. It fixed it as an industry, under a rule, with testing it did not want and recalls it did not enjoy, and it worked.
IFPA, Western Growers, the California and Arizona LGMAs, FMI and NGA: you are in the same rooms in Orlando this week. You have my lists. In short: test, trace, name, keep the cattle away, and pay for the people who count the sick. Do that and I will keep the promise I made beef in 2002 and lettuce in 2006. I will find another line of work.
Put me out of the leafy green business. Please.
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