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Well, I personally try to avoid buying american products, which is where most of the contamination is happening at the moment, but that might be easier since I don't live there. It's always best to check the labelling of products/produce, as they will often state where that product is from, but it's important to also cook your veg thoroughly as well. Others might have differing views on your question :)
Thanks for your post!
Taylor Farms is in Mexico though.
Yeah, still technically America apparently, but yeah the USA tends to purchase many fruits and veggies from Mexico (where I presume tends to be a better climate for various crops to grow, usually)..
Blame Mexico and whoever is watering the plants with sewage...
You're right that Mexico has a better climate for growing fresh produce, it's where Canada also gets a large portion of out-of-season produce from as well.
If I understand correctly, the reason as to why there is a significant spike in food contamination & infection/illness in the US is due largely to the rollback of funding & legislation by the current administration, which makes it more difficult for those in the food inspection & quality control sectors to work effectively for consumers.
Another workaround could be to buy frozen produce, as there doesn't seem to be a lot of news about contaminated frozen fruit & veg. Hopefully, at least!
4 big companies own most of the lettuce the United States eats. They buy up all the small companies, creating a lettuce oligarchy. They campaign and contribute money to the powers that be and get more relaxed rules about safety and sanitation.
The committees that maintained and enforced these guidelines were, as you mentioned, effected by the Department of Government Efficiency.
A lot of these farm workers are paid by the piece, and don't always have nearby access to clean facilities. They end up rockin' out dunkers in a nearby ditch, instead of taking time out of their already small paycheck to hit the porta potty.
Classic "American doesn't think of mentioning what they're talking about is a US specific thing and writes like only the US exists".
I'd recommend diving in to the details on a per-case basis. For cyclosporiasis caused by a protozoan parasite, the affected crops in the States seem to be lettuce, basil, cilantro, certain berries, and whatnot.
I haven't taken a deep dive in to sanitizing, but I believe you can parboil / cook produce to make them safe, and/or do white vinegar pre-washes. The point is to research well and follow the guidelines.
Sounds great on paper.
Now, if I go get a burger from Burger King, well where TF do they get their lettuce from? Ask the cashier, they'll throw their hands up and say 'I don't fucking know'.
Ask them for a burger without lettuce, they'll just take an already made burger off the heat rack and take the lettuce off of it, still leaving a contaminated burger.
At least Taco Bell is trying to do the right healthy thing for now, no lettuce on their tacos for the time being.
But seriously, if I went to a Subway (ignoring but also observing their fake tuna scandal), if I asked them where they get their lettuce from, they'd probably tell me either they don't know, or aren't authorized to say.....
I have never been to a BK that has their burgers pre-made. They have enough variety on their menu and adjustments on orders that it surely can't be worth anticipating things like that. Assembling a burger takes less than a minute once everything is cooked.
The average subway worker probably wouldn't know who their suppliers are, but I doubt it's a secret. They likely use the same regional suppliers other restaurants do. The manager could probably tell you.
For the most part the lettuce issue has passed. It was linked to Taylor farms and the impacted lettuce has essentially all met the expiry date at this point.
However as you’ve mentioned this years been rough. Taylor farms also had the jalapeño salmonella issue, which is ongoing. Midwest poultry recalled 1.6 million eggs, also for salmonella.
It’s generally good if you avoid those vendors though, but maybe stay away from jalapeños for a bit because Taylor supplies a LOT of the industry (Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, etc have had subsequent recalls of things like guacamole made with the jalapeños)
Awesome fact: Taylor farms donated over 2 million to trump and conservative pacs in 2025, including 1 million to maga inc. and the lobby they are a part of heavily pushed to change rules about tracing outbreaks like this, about a decade ago they lobbied successfully to defund foodborne illness pathogen testing (cutting testing by about 80%), and they paid over $800k to lobby related to “food regulation”, which was potentially related to using irrigation water in farming. Farmers are supposed to have to test irrigation water because it’s frequently linked to outbreaks starting in 2025 for large farms with smaller ones over 2026/7.
So basically farmers, including Taylor farms with serious bank, have systematically broken down systems related to food safety to increase profits while literally causing death. About 3k people die per year of foodborne illness but 2026 is shaping to be a significant increase, both in mortality and number of incidents. The rising number of incidents is potentially attributable to the huge amount of cuts to federal policy about this and the increasing number of incidents combined with decreased funding means response is far slower. It’s probably going to get worse
Fast food places don't assemble cold ingredients with hot ingredients until ordered. It's a big part of the reason why burgers with lettuce tend to cost more at those places.
Taco Bell still has lettuce in their stores. They only pulled certain lettuce from certain sources and warned customers that not every store might have lettuce available for a few days, but any shortage didn't last long and they have been able to serve food with lettuce in most places the entire time.
If you're that concerned about this outbreak, you should probably catch up on the information of how these things work.
You know, if you don't specify that you're wanting help on restaurant food, you're going to keep getting generalized answers focused on food safety you can directly control
Sounds great on paper.
It's clearly meant for those who cook. But since you seem to like fast food, let's see...
I wouldn't expect the sales front to know very much, so. A (honest) manager might be a good start, allowing you to compare their notes against whatever other sources you could find, most of which would probably be online. At a nearby cantina I go to, the shift manager actually listed out his three suppliers. Another useful bit of data.
This is the kind of thing I might also try GPT on, which is good for complex searches that pull a bunch of data together as summaries.
But yeah-- get online and see who's complaining about symptoms, and where they likely ate from. See who's done the research and hear where their confidences lie. Build a Venn diagram to help you get a sense for the safest-possible FF places / regionals to eat from. Et cetera...
As legit as your comment/advice is, they say cyclospora takes up to 2 weeks before symptoms develop..
I can barely remember what I ate yesterday half the time, and even if I tried to take notes, half the time the folks that prepared the food for me simply answer "It's FOOD motherfucker, eat it or starve!"
So yeah, half the time I don't exactly know what I'm even eating, not allowed to know, either secret recipe, or perhaps the cooks don't even know..
Are you in the military or something like that? Sounds like you have almost zero control over what you eat, which obviously sucks.
No, not quite. Never been in the military, but my late father was in the service. Dad always made the food, and barely allowed me access to the kitchen, aside from microwaving some pizza rolls or frozen burittos or some simple stuff.
Stove, forbidden, because I didn't own that. Microwave only allowed because he forced me to learn how to fix them. Food names, forbidden, it was all "It's FOOD, eat or fucking starve!"
I'm being as short and honest as I can here, but yeah I couldn't even tell fried chicken strips from fried shrimp until age 27, when I finally nerved up and told daddy to quit giving me bullshit and teach me how to wash my own clothes (I didn't own the washing machine either...)
Sorry but not sorry, I'm just honestly answering your question.
Damn, that sucks. Although sadly, it does seem pretty common in the States.
Now if you're wealthy enough to afford restaurant food all your life, then no worries? Otherwise, if I were you, I'd look to start making simple meals for yourself, stat. There are lots of helpful videos to get you started on that, and of course, lots of example meals from lovely communities like !cooking@lemmy.world and !homecooking@lemmy.world.
If you tell me what kind of food you like, I might be able to offer you some simple meal prep suggestions. Or better yet, throw that question out to either or both of those communities! I bet they'd love to help you.
Okay, in terms of this next part, I understand that everyone hates AI and LLM's and I'm right with y'all for the most part. But like I say, sometimes LLM's can be super-useful for polling a bunch of data and summarizing what it finds. So I started a process just now, and maybe the results will be of some use:
My combined FF ranking
I've weighted the evidence roughly in this order:
Best bets right now
Always keep in mind of course that using an LLM is like asking a knowledgeable, opinionated person for their thoughts, who can also make key mistakes and even hallucinate results. Which is why it's important to cross-check these results against multiple other searches. But again-- if there's a 'safest area of using LLM's,' IME it's in using them for stuff like this.
Full discussion here, in which GPT identifies key areas of concern:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a825204-a804-83ea-80f4-261eb4efce97
I do thank you for the thought, but I think I'll be skipping on the AI chatbot thing.
I started getting a grip on such things around age 27. I'm almost 44 now, so I've done quite a bit of catch up since then.
Still always things to learn, just not from AI...
Perfectly understandable upon that, but you do seem kind of... resistant to information / suggestion. (sorry for my rudeness)
Like you're stuck doing your thing, and you prefer to rightfully complain about that shitty situation, but somehow you keep finding ways to evade anything that might improve that situation. Like you've totally given up on change, isn't that right?
You've normalised the whole situation in to your life, and now you're carrying that boulder like Sisyphus did, and to let go off that rock would be... fucking unthinkable at this point?
(and again, I'm being a total shithead here, but...)
Nope. I was 27, now I'm 44.
I'm carrying entirely new boulders right now...
Well then, good luck, mate! :D
Usually affected items are removed from the shelves, no?
Usually, but with cuts to the entities designed to ensure our products are safe, most bets are off.
Yes, that's the general ideal approach.
But it's not like the snap of a finger and 'poof it's gone'..
It can take a week or more before they verify and get the contaminated shit off the store shelves, out of warehouses, and out of restaurants...
Then what? No more lettuce for the rest of the year, because the entire lettuce crop of the year is contaminated?
Eventually
And how would one know if an item was affected?
By the time you’re hearing about the recall, the danger is usually already over.
Crops grow yearly. Seems to me that nobody can safely eat lettuce or other contaminated products until the next crop next year...
I don't understand your logic. It's not like with bird flu where they cull them and it's 2 years before egg prices went back to normal.
They can discard every jalapeno grown in California. There would still be jalapenos grown elsewhere that are fine.
That sometimes depends on the supplier, they could (and often do) have contracts with each other...
by whole products not prerpocessed and wash it well. This is why indoor agriculture is a big deal as most contamination comes from feces runoff of animals.
Yep.
Tell that to McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy's, etc fast food places..
Yeah yeah, cook your own food, not everyone has the time for that depending on their job, some folks rely on fast food to make it from one job to the next..
Ask the fast food place where their lettuce came from, they either don't know, or they'll get fired for telling you...
its just advice not an order. people can do what they like. I stopped eating out at sitdown long back because of cost and a few years back even with fast food costs.
I get you, but there's only 24 hours in a day.
Not often, but sometimes I've had 3 jobs a day. So how do you manage the time between jobs while also filling your belly, then going home to feed the cats, shit, piss, bathe, and sleep?
And then the next morning try to figure out why your car won't start, smack it with a hammer, and miss the first 2 hours of the first job to go get and install a new starter?
TL;DR: Not everybody has the time (or even facilities sometimes) to prepare their own food, barely enough time to feed the 2 cats I had..
Edit: Sounds like this year it might be safer to eat catfood than salad...