From lettuce to jalapenos to frozen berries, it has been a summer of food recalls headlined by an unprecedented outbreak of foodborne illness.
The highest-profile outbreak involved iceberg lettuce linked to thousands of infections in what federal officials said is the largest known outbreak of cyclosporiasis in U.S. history. Many got sick after eating items with shredded lettuce at Taco Bell, sourced from Mexico and linked to the company Taylor Farms.
“It was absolutely horrendous,” Lucas Burnham told Scripps News about the sickness he suffered in June that left him spending much of his planned vacation in the restroom. “It wasn’t just a normal, 'I’m sick.' It was, 'I’m laying in the bed until I have to go to the bathroom again.'”
Experts tell Scripps News the reasons behind the food poisoning Burnham and many others experienced this summer are complicated and varied, and point to the long-delayed need to upgrade the nation’s food safety system.
“I think the summer of 2026 has been so significant,” said Frank Yiannas, a former FDA deputy commissioner for food policy and response. “I really believe the nation… needs to take a pause and say it’s time once again for us to figure out, how do we further modernize?”
A massive increase in cyclospora infections
The CDC says since May 1 there have been more than 18,000 confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis reported in nearly every state in the country — with more than 11,000 of those cases coming from the iceberg lettuce outbreak.
Those numbers represented a massive increase from previous years: the CDC said in 2024 and 2025 it documented around 1,200 cases during what it calls “cyclosporiasis season” between May 1 and August 31. (In 2023, the CDC said the season began earlier, in April, and the case total was close to 2,300 – still significantly less than this year’s numbers.)
And while the season is officially over, the numbers are expected to continue to rise because it can take up to six weeks for positive tests to be reported to CDC.
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Why the spike in cyclosporiasis?
The illness is caused by the microscopic parasite cyclospora, and the reasons why it has stricken so many people this year are not yet fully known. Public health officials still haven’t been able to pinpoint the sources of several clusters of outbreaks.
But the majority of the cases have been linked to iceberg lettuce, a food that Americans commonly eat in a variety of meals from salads to sandwiches to tacos. Some experts say the increase in the numbers might be driven in part because lettuce is a more widely consumed and distributed product than the sources of prior cyclosporiasis outbreaks like raspberries, cilantro, and parsley.
Experts have also said the high-profile nature of the lettuce outbreak may be prompting more people to go to the doctor when they’re experiencing symptoms.
“We know that more testing is happening, oftentimes in the setting of news coverage of large outbreaks,” said Rachel Herlihy, the state epidemiologist at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “We know that does lead more people to seek care and seek testing.”
Role of government cuts and delays to food safety modernization plans
The federal government is pushing back on the notion workforce cuts and changes to the public health system played a role in this summer’s outbreaks.
The CDC said its laboratory supporting the cyclospora response was not impacted by layoffs, but has lost staff “due to attrition.” And an FDA spokesperson said the agency “continues to have the staff required for outbreak investigations—no FDA investigators were affected by staffing changes or reductions in force.”
Several experts told Scripps News they did not see evidence those cuts led to the outbreak.
“Those cuts, while they are poorly timed, probably didn’t lead to this problem,” Don Schaffner, a food microbiology professor at Rutgers University, told Scripps in August.
Experts did question whether the government could have reacted sooner to the outbreaks, or whether they may have been detected sooner with improved government surveillance. Glenn Morris, the former director of the Emerging Pathogen Institute at the University of Florida, helped create the government surveillance program, Foodnet, decades ago. In 2025, states’ reporting of cyclospora and many other pathogens to the federal government through Foodnet became optional though some states, including Colorado, still participate in monitoring.
“Is there a direct cause and effect relationship with the occurrence of the cyclospora outbreak? No,” Morris said. “This outbreak would have occurred even if we still had FoodNet, but we would have had better quality data going in, which may have allowed us to detect something sooner, and/or allowed us to make interventions at an earlier point in time.”
Another contributing factor, Yiannas said, is the continued delay in implementation of a traceability rule as part of the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act. The rule requires improved record-keeping and information sharing across the food supply chain, intended to speed up outbreak tracing, but compliance that was originally required to begin in January is now not required until 2028.
“I do think that the delay in the food traceability rule, and the entire food system not being further along like we’d like it to be, probably slowed our ability to respond,” he said.
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Role of the food industry
When it comes to fresh fruits and vegetables, experts told Scripps News the primary responsibility for ensuring safety falls on the companies that grow and distribute food.
“The safety of these foods is primarily controlled by the food industry,” Schaffner said. “It’s not FDA inspections that make them safe because FDA is probably only there once a year, or even less frequently.”
“The reality is, the government is never going to be big enough to be able to be at every facility all the time,” Yiannas said. “Regulatory oversight is an additional layer of protection.”
Taylor Fresh Foods, the company linked to the iceberg lettuce outbreak, told Scripps News it invests more than $200 million annually into its food safety protocols.
“We have set the industry standard for traceability, going beyond what is required by law to implement processes that allow us to trace every salad component back to a specific harvest time and location. We test our leafy green commodities for a variety of pathogens, going above and beyond any industry guidance or requirements,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
"When questions were raised about the source of the recent cyclospora outbreak, we immediately removed all potentially implicated product from the marketplace, and out of an abundance of caution we issued an even broader recall of all iceberg lettuce sourced from the region. We have also voluntarily suspended all iceberg lettuce sourcing and production from central Mexico,” the statement continued.
“Additionally, we’ve commissioned independent experts to conduct a top-to-bottom review of food safety processes and protocols in our central Mexico facility, where as of July 18, 2026 we have temporarily suspended production of all products. We continue to work with health authorities, customers, and independent farming partners to address this issue,” the statement said.
“Most of the food most of us eat every day is safe”
Months after a quick fast food run got him sick, Lucas Burnham said his stomach still isn’t back to normal. He looks at all foods as if they have “caution tape.”
“Everything I’m eating now.. I’m worried,” Burnham said. “Because of how sensitive my stomach is.”
Many Americans might be similarly worried about lettuce and other produce, after this summer of recalls and outbreaks. But experts told Scripps News they’re still eating fresh foods.
“I haven’t changed my consumption patterns one bit and I will not change them because it’s important to realize that most of the food that most of us eat every day is safe,” Schaffner said last month. “I continue to eat a salad most days at dinner.. because it’s summertime and salads are great.”
“Sadly, people are avoiding a very healthy product. So I continue to eat lettuce because I know it was domestically produced at the time right now that we’re currently in, and it has nothing to do with the illnesses that occurred months ago,” Yiannas said.
