A company’s public statement in the middle of an outbreak is not marketing. It is evidence — what the company said it knew, and when, published to the world at a moment when nobody had the benefit of hindsight. I have built cases on those statements since 1993. I have been reading and saving this one since the day the recall issued, and the sixteen days since are worth laying out end to end, because the words have moved a great deal and the substance underneath them has not moved at all.
Start with the original. On July 17 the company posted a statement that opened with the people who got sick — the ill, their families, and Americans whose trust in produce had been shaken. It said that trust took decades to earn. It said the removal of product was based on information FDA had provided the day before. And it said something that has not appeared in a single version since: that FDA’s traceback was pointing to a specific independent farm, described as less than one percent of the United States iceberg supply, as the potential source.
The recall was July 17. FDA reported a positive test on July 18. FDA retracted that result as a false positive on July 19. The July 17 statement therefore explains why the company pulled product at a moment when no positive laboratory result existed anywhere in the world, and the reason it gives is FDA’s traceback and the epidemiology. That is a party admission, and nothing published afterward reaches back and unsays it.
Two days later the same address served a different document. The July 19 version led with the assertion that FDA had apologized to the company. Sympathy for the sick moved from the first paragraph to the fourth and got shorter. The recall was recast in the completed past tense and attributed to an abundance of caution. The acknowledgment about the specific farm was gone. I wrote that night about how the victims ate the evidence in May, and I have not changed my view since.
There was no apology. I went looking for one in FDA’s July 19 update and what is there is a laboratory correction and a notification to the firm — and in the same paragraph, a statement that FDA continues working with the firm to ensure product implicated in this outbreak has been removed. The word implicated survived the false positive. The next day FDA answered in public without naming anybody: the false-positive sample does not change the basis for the investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the recall, and traceback and outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms locations in central Mexico. Note the plural locations. The company had described one independent farm at less than one percent of supply and then stopped describing it at all.
By July 24 the page had been rewritten again, this time leading with money — more than two hundred million dollars a year in independently audited food safety protocols — and reporting that sourcing and central-Mexico production had been suspended since July 18 and independent experts commissioned for a top-to-bottom review. The apology claim was simply absent. No correction, no note, no acknowledgment it had ever been there.
On July 30 the company built something new, a Cyclospora information hub at its own address, and the old newsroom link now redirects there. It was revised again on July 31, and that revision created a problem. The FAQ list of states that received recalled product now runs to twenty-eight and includes West Virginia, which FDA added a week earlier. The distribution paragraph higher up the same page still lists twenty-seven and still leaves West Virginia out. West Virginia is one of the nine states in the federal outbreak.
Now. All of that is about words, and I have spent enough of this outbreak on words. Here is the substance the words have never touched, in sixteen days and five versions.
This is not the first time, and the record of it is long. In the summer of 2013, cyclosporiasis sickened 631 people across twenty-five states. Iowa and Nebraska accounted for 239 of them, and epidemiologic and traceback work by those two states, CDC and FDA tied their restaurant cases to bagged salad mix produced by Taylor Farms de Mexico in Doctor Mora, Guanajuato, and served at Olive Garden and Red Lobster. I want to be exact here, because the number gets misused: the Texas cases that summer were tied to cilantro from an unrelated producer, and the cause of more than a hundred other illnesses was never determined. The salad mix link is to Iowa and Nebraska.
FDA then published an environmental assessment of the processing plant and five ranches. Investigators analyzed roughly 835 product, water and environmental samples, including more than 269 human fecal samples collected from sanitary facilities on the ranches, and recovered the parasite from none of them — the assessment began five weeks after the last known illness. What survives from that document is its second recommendation, which told the firm to determine whether Cyclospora is a reasonably likely food safety hazard associated with the Guanajuato leafy green growing region, and if it is, to re-evaluate the wash step. That was November 2013.
There is one more piece of the 2013 record, and it goes directly to the testing question. The company suspended shipments to the United States on August 9, 2013, and resumed them on August 25 with FDA’s concurrence. FDA said at the time that its decision rested in part on the environmental assessment and in part on its review of a product sampling plan for Cyclospora that Taylor Farms de Mexico had put in place. A sampling plan for this parasite, reviewed by a federal agency, as part of the price of reopening a plant — thirteen years ago. I have gone looking for a single published result from it and I have not found one.
Reasonably likely hazard is not casual language. It is the vocabulary of hazard analysis, and the company’s own hub says its processing facilities operate under the FSMA preventive controls rule — under which a hazard requiring a preventive control brings monitoring, verification and records along with it. Meanwhile FDA’s own fact sheet for farmers carries a footnote listing where cyclosporiasis is endemic: Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Puerto Rico, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela, Viet Nam and Zimbabwe. Mexico is on that list and has been for years.
The question, then, is not why you did not test. The question is what your hazard analysis says about this parasite. If you identified it as a reasonably likely hazard, produce the preventive control, the verification activity and the records. If you concluded it was not a reasonably likely hazard, explain the basis for that conclusion — thirteen years after a federal agency told you to make the determination, in a country that same agency lists as endemic, at the same plant, growing a ready-to-eat product with no kill step. I cannot construct an answer that survives both versions of the question.
The same fact sheet tells farmers to assess water systems and adjacent land for sources of contamination, and it names sewage and septic systems and land application of wastewater. The hub lists adjacent land review as part of the company’s ranch inspections. Good. There is a public swimming resort roughly eight hundred feet from the Doctor Mora plant, and satellite imagery shows it operating there years before the 2013 assessment was written. What did the adjacent land review record about it?
Which brings me to the testing, and to the number the company has put at the center of its defense. The hub says that as of July 24 FDA had no confirmed positive product test results, and that the company’s own testing — approximately two thousand samples taken in central Mexico since May — returned zero positives. I want to be precise about what that does and does not show, and I want to be fair about what the company actually claims.
On water, the company describes its own program in seven words: water sources are tested for indicator organisms. FDA’s fact sheet says that traditional microbial testing, meaning fecal indicators like generic E. colior fecal coliforms, will not identify the presence of this parasite. FDA also says — and I will give the agency the rest of its sentence — that indicator testing may help identify poor water quality, which may itself be a sign of human fecal contamination. Indicators are not useless. They are a proxy. But a proxy for fecal loading is not a test for the organism, and this organism’s only reservoir on earth is human feces.
On product, the company says more. It says it uses the latest FDA-validated testing method for Cyclospora, which means FDA’s Bacteriological Analytical Manual Chapter 19b, published in June 2017 and since extended to matrices including romaine lettuce. There is a companion method, Chapter 19c, published in 2020, for agricultural water — validated to detect roughly six oocysts in ten liters. Both have existed for years. The honest statement, then, is not that this company never tested for the parasite. It is that the water program, by the company’s own description, was never aimed at it, and that the product testing it did do cannot bear the weight now being placed on it.
Here is why. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency independently verified FDA’s produce method and published the results. Leafy greens spiked with two hundred oocysts were detected ninety-three percent of the time. A 2023 modeling study in the Journal of Food Protection says the same thing in the federal register of the scientific literature: these methods have been shown not to always detect contamination when present at low levels.
Apply that to two thousand samples and the number stops being impressive. It is not evidence that the product was clean. It is evidence that a method with a thirty percent detection rate, run against an unknown fraction of an enormous volume of lettuce, mostly after the contamination window had already closed, found nothing.
FDA says its traceback and its outbreak data converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from this company’s locations in central Mexico. The company says its own two thousand samples found nothing. Both of those can be true at once, and if they are, the conclusion is not that the lettuce was clean. The conclusion is that the testing program could not find what was in it. Negative results from a program that cannot detect the hazard are not exoneration. They are a description of the program.
The company’s position is that epidemiology can identify a potential source but that only a positive laboratory test can confirm a specific product caused illness. Fine — that is a defensible view of proof, and plenty of scientists hold it. But a standard that strict about positives has nothing at all to say about negatives. If a positive is the only thing that counts, then two thousand negatives count for nothing too, and the company cannot cite them as if they did.
One last item, and it closes the circle back to 2013. The posts says the company’s teams invented a wash system that is tested and verified by USDA and describes custom spin dryers and consistent wash-water chemistry. That is a wash step, validated against bacteria, for an organism against which no wash step and no chemical treatment has ever been validated — FDA says in its own voice that chlorine and other common antimicrobial treatments are not effective on it. FDA told this facility to re-evaluate its wash step in 2013. Thirteen years later the wash step is on the website as a credential.
I do not fault a company for defending itself, and I do not fault it for updating a page as facts change. What I fault is a record that moves without saying it moved, while the questions that actually matter stay untouched underneath it. Five versions in sixteen days, an apology asserted and quietly dropped, a traceback acknowledgment removed and later restored, a state list that answers its own question two ways on one screen — and in all of it, not one sentence about what changed at that plant after 2013.
Two committees in Congress have asked this company for documents by August 10 and August 13. If I had one request to add to theirs, it would be short. Produce the hazard analysis. Produce the water testing records and say what organism they were looking for. Produce the adjacent land reviews for the Doctor Mora ranches. And produce the 2013 file, the one that answers whether this parasite was ever treated as a reasonably likely hazard at a plant in a country FDA calls endemic. Everything else on that website is a claim.