Shipping Romaine Across the Country Isn’t the Problem. Good. Now Let’s Talk About What Is.

The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service recently posted a short piece on its “Scientific Discoveries” site called “Moving Forward with Lettuce Safety.” It is two paragraphs long. I read it three times.

I’ve been litigating E. coli cases since Jack in the Box in 1993. I’ve represented families sickened by contaminated lettuce and spinach for most of the years since. So when the federal government puts “lettuce safety” in a headline, I pay attention.

Here’s my take. The science behind it is fine. The question it answers is narrow. And the way it’s been sold to the public misses the point of why we keep sending kids and grandparents to the hospital after they eat a salad.

What ARS actually did

Between 2017 and 2020 the country had a run of romaine E. coli outbreaks. Some illness clusters showed up far from the fields, in the Midwest and the Northeast. That got the industry wondering about “forward processing” — shipping whole, raw romaine from California and Arizona to plants back East, where it gets chopped, washed, bagged and sold regionally. Longer trip. More time between field and wash line. Could that be helping E. coli along?

ARS scientists led by Xiangwu Nou at the Environmental Microbial and Food Safety Laboratory set out to find out. The project ran from 2022 to 2023 and was funded through the Center for Produce Safety, the produce industry’s research group. The team followed romaine from the same commercial field down two paths — one to a processor near the field, one cross-country to an East Coast plant — with data loggers riding in the bins. Then, in the lab, they inoculated romaine with outbreak strains of E. coli O157:H7 and simulated both trips.

The results: no significant difference in how O157:H7 survived or grew between the two paths. Surviving pathogen numbers were actually a hair lower on the forward-processing side. But — and this matters — the forward-processed lettuce carried a much higher total bacterial load and aged faster in storage.

ARS’s public conclusion: forward processing has been confirmed safe, and the industry doesn’t have to think about an expensive overhaul.

What the page gets wrong, or leaves out

First, a lab finding that E. coli doesn’t grow faster on a long truck ride is not the same thing as “confirming the safety” of anything. E. coli O157:H7 doesn’t need to grow to hurt you. The infectious dose is tiny — as few as 10 to 100 cells. If the bug is on the leaf when it leaves the field, a cold truck to Maryland doesn’t make it safer. It just doesn’t make it much worse. That is a useful answer to a narrow question. It is not a safety certificate.

Second, the page drops the finding that cuts the other way. Lettuce that travels before processing arrived at the plant with a heavier bacterial load and broke down faster. The researchers said that big jump in overall bacteria didn’t show up as more O157:H7 in their simulation. Fair enough. But the public deserves the whole result, not just the part that saves money.

Third, the project title promised more: antimicrobial susceptibility and infectivity. Did the long trip change how E. coli responds to sanitizers in the wash water? Did it change how dangerous the bug is? The public summary says nothing. If those questions were answered, tell us. If they weren’t, say so.

Fourth, look at who the page is written for. Its punchline is that industry was spared an overhaul that would have cost money and disrupted supply. It also claims “tons” of lettuce are discarded every year because of E. coli — with no number and no source. I want that number. It may be the most important fact on the page, because it tells us how often contaminated lettuce gets caught before it reaches us. And by implication, how often it doesn’t.

And finally, the big one. The study never asked how E. coli got on the lettuce in the first place. Truck routes didn’t put cattle manure on romaine. The field did.

What we already know

We are not short on clues. Spring 2018: romaine from the Yuma region sickened 210 people in 36 states, put 96 in the hospital, gave 27 hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) and killed five. Investigators found the outbreak strain in a 3.5-mile stretch of irrigation canal. FDA noted that canal sat next to a feedlot that can hold more than 100,000 head of cattle. The cattle industry was quick to say no definitive link had been proven. Of course, the environmental sampling happened in June — after the harvest was over and there was no lettuce left to test.

Fall 2018 and fall 2019: a reoccurring strain of O157:H7 caused two multistate romaine outbreaks out of Santa Maria and the Salinas Valley — 234 illnesses in 33 states. Investigators pointed to a contaminated agricultural water reservoir in 2018 and cattle grazing on adjacent land in 2019. In 2019, Maryland — the same state where ARS did this work — found the outbreak strain in an unopened bag of salad.

Fall 2020: FDA found the outbreak strain in cattle feces on a roadside about 1.3 miles upslope from a farm tied to the illnesses. FDA said plainly that outbreak investigations since 2013 point to nearby cattle as a likely contributing factor, and told Central Coast growers to treat this strain as a reasonably foreseeable hazard.

CDC now tracks these as REP strains — reoccurring, emerging or persisting. One, REPEXH01, includes the 2018 Yuma outbreak. Another, REPEXH02, keeps coming back from the California Central Coast fall after fall. It has turned up in sick people, bagged salad, irrigation reservoir sediment, a cattle trough and cattle feces. Recent genomic work found the REPEXH01 strain studied is a close relative of the 2006 spinach outbreak strain. These bugs live out there. They aren’t hitchhiking on trucks.

And it keeps happening. In November 2024 a romaine outbreak sickened 89 people in 15 states, hospitalized 36, caused seven HUS cases and killed one. Fifty of the cases were in Missouri, many tied to salads served at a St. Louis County high school. FDA traced the lettuce to a single grower and ranch, confirmed romaine as the vehicle — and closed the investigation in January 2025 without telling the public who grew it. We identified Taylor Farms through our litigation, not from the government.

Three petitions to close the gaps

After more than thirty years of these cases, the pattern is plain. Investigators find the outbreak strain at the edge of a cattle operation and stop at the fence. They figure out which farm grew the lettuce and don’t tell us. And when the food is pulled, nobody can find out which stores, restaurants or schools got it. I’m filing three citizen petitions with FDA, one for each of those failures.

The first asks FDA to require access and microbial sampling at animal feeding operations implicated in multistate outbreaks. Remember Yuma. Investigators took six samples inside a feedlot built for more than 100,000 cattle — in June, for illnesses that started in March. Six samples is not a negative result. It’s the absence of a test. In a 2025 review of FDA farm investigations after leafy greens E. coli outbreaks from 2009 through 2021, FDA and CDC scientists found livestock nearby in every single-farm investigation where that information was recorded. They also wrote that the two agencies have no direct authority to get onto private livestock land. An operator can simply say no.

The authority is already in the statute. Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act lets FDA write inspection regulations to stop the interstate spread of disease, and it names animals. FDA used it in 1975 to ban the sale of tiny pet turtles that were giving kids Salmonella, and that rule has stood for half a century. My petition asks for something narrow: triggered only by a written finding that an operation is implicated in an outbreak, time-limited, sampling only. No seizing animals. No regulating husbandry. Just let investigators walk onto ground they’ve already identified as the likely source and take samples while the answer can still prevent the next outbreak.

The second asks FDA to stop treating the identity of an outbreak firm as confidential. On September 10, 2026, FDA closed a fourteen-person romaine E. coli investigation and named no grower, no processor, no brand and no state, saying the lettuce was past shelf life. That’s the same reason it gave for keeping quiet about the 89-person outbreak in 2024. Yet FDA has named farms, processors and brands in exactly that situation at least eight times since 2006. In October, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel told HHS that the obstacle is FDA’s own regulations, and that FDA has the authority to change them. My petition asks it to: when epidemiology plus traceback or genomic evidence identifies the source, the name is public — recall or no recall, shelf life or no shelf life.

The third asks FDA to publish retail consignee lists in every Class I food recall — the stores, restaurants, schools, hospitals and nursing homes that got the product — and to classify every recall within ten days. USDA has published those lists for meat and poultry since 2008. If you bought recalled ground beef, you can find out whether your store got it. If you bought recalled bagged salad, you usually can’t. Congress told FDA in 2011 to consider the USDA approach, and FDA wrote guidance instead. Worse, a list that attaches only to the word “recall” can be dodged by never using the word. This fall, chicken wraps tied to a fifty-person E. coli outbreak were “proactively removed” — never called a recall, never classified, no store list. The public learned the brand from a lawsuit we filed, not from the government.

What else we need

Beyond the petitions, here’s the rest of my list.

Study the source, not the truck. Where do REP strains live between outbreaks — cattle, water, soil, dust, wildlife? How do they move from feedlot or rangeland onto a leaf? FDA launched a California longitudinal study years ago. The results need to be public and turned into enforceable setback rules for feedlots and grazing near produce fields. Voluntary guidance has had more than a decade to work. It hasn’t.

Enforce the water rule. FDA’s revised pre-harvest agricultural water rule reached large farms in April 2025 and small farms in April 2026. A rule without inspections, sampling and public data is just paper. Tell us how many farms have been inspected and what was found.

Stop delaying traceability. FDA’s food traceability rule, which covers leafy greens, was supposed to take effect in January 2026. FDA pushed it to July 2028, and Congress then told FDA not to enforce it before that date. Every month of delay means slower tracebacks and more people eating the product after an outbreak has started.

Test the product. Lettuce has no kill step. Nobody cooks a Caesar salad. We need routine, independent microbiological sampling of produce at market — the kind USDA did through its Microbiological Data Program before it was killed in 2012. Bring it back.

Tell the whole story. When ARS posts a public summary, include all the findings, link the peer-reviewed paper, and say who paid for the work. Good science deserves honest communication.

The bottom line

Forward processing didn’t make romaine more dangerous. Good to know. But the lettuce that sickened my clients wasn’t poisoned somewhere on Interstate 80. It was contaminated in a field — often near cattle, often by water — by strains we’ve watched come back for years.

Until research dollars, regulation and transparency are aimed there — starting with these three petitions — “moving forward with lettuce safety” is going to look a lot like standing still.

Sources

USDA ARS, “Moving Forward with Lettuce Safety”

USDA ARS, Research Project: Assessing Romaine Lettuce “Forward Processing”

USDA NAL, Food Safety Research Projects: Forward Processing project record

Food Safety Magazine, Little Difference Between E. coli Growth in Forward vs. Source Processing (May 16, 2024)

Produce Blue Book, forward processing study coverage (May 7, 2024)

Blue Book Services, CPS study gauges pathogen risks from forward processing

Food Poison Journal, CDC final update on 2018 Yuma romaine outbreak

Food Safety News, Yuma romaine growers hopeful harvest will end without E. coli issues (March 2019)

Feedstuffs, FDA mentions cattle farm as potential source of E. coli outbreak (Aug. 8, 2018)

Epidemiology & Infection (PMC), Two multistate STEC O157 outbreaks linked to romaine, 2018–2019

Contagion Live, CDC announces E. coli outbreak likely linked to romaine (Nov. 26, 2019)