A parasite has taken over the news and social media. Across the country, thousands of people have been infected with cyclosporiasis, an infection caused by a parasite known as cyclospora, which can cause severe diarrhea, cramping, fatigue, and more.
Cyclosporiasis infections are caused when a person consumes food or water contaminated with feces. In 2025, there were about 2,700 cases of cyclosporiasis in the US. Since May 1 of 2026, there have been over 1,500 cases confirmed with over 5,000 more being investigated.
The current outbreak was initially linked to iceberg lettuce distributed by Taylor Farms and used in products at Taco Bell locations in multiple states. While the FDA has now issued a statement that the finding on lettuce linked to Taylor Farms was a false positive, a look at corporate agribusiness through the example of Taylor Farms highlights the conditions which allow these outbreaks to emerge
Who is Taylor Farms?
The largest producer of salads and pre-cut vegetables in the world, Taylor Farms is a private corporation emblematic of the profit-driven ‘agribusiness’ model that dominates our food supply. Describing themselves as “the leading global producer of salads and healthy fresh foods, with production facilities across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Western Europe,” Taylor Farms has multiple investments in European produce distributors, as well as a recent string of acquisitions demonstrating its growing control over massive segments of the global produce supply.
This reach is also shown in the sheer number of businesses Taylor Farms supplies with produce. Its salads can be found in Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, and other major grocery stores. The company also supplies produce to chain restaurants like Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Chipotle.
Enter The Jungle
One hundred years ago, socialist journalist Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was published. In the novel, Sinclair dramatically exposed the terrible conditions faced by the working class in Chicago’s meatpacking district. The book generated widespread demand for change in how food was produced, forcing the federal government to pass legislation which would lead to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Today, the conditions for the over 20,000 workers in Taylor Farms’ processing plants sound just as appalling as those described by Sinclair. At least one of these processing plants in Colorado Springs was investigated by the Food and Drug Administration in 2024, after an E. coli outbreak was traced back to onions handled at the plant. The report highlighted a wide range of food safety violations, from equipment with “apparent biofilm and large amounts of food debris” left on it after cleaning, to pooling water near work areas and other improper sanitation procedures.
Alongside these unsanitary conditions, disrespect and disregard for the health and safety of workers has run rampant. In 2016, workers at a Taylor Farms production plant in Tracy, California protested against “poverty wages, disrespect, and severe violations of their most basic rights.”
The plant in Tracy had been linked to a previous outbreak of E. coli, and workers cited seeing mold and animal feces near work areas. In 2025, a worker was killed while cleaning a machine at its processing plant in Swedesboro, New Jersey. Insultingly, Taylor Farms was only slapped with a measly $1 million fine for the death of a worker – a mere drop in the bucket of its $7 billion revenue!
Trump administration cuts
The horrific conditions of capitalist agribusiness are only being intensified by the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal government. Since beginning his second term in office, Trump has dramatically diminished the resources of agencies like the FDA, CDC, NIH and USDA. At the FDA alone, thousands of workers have been cut, resulting in a greatly reduced capability to track, prevent, and manage outbreaks of foodborne illness.
In addition, the CDC announced last year that it was effectively gutting its foodborne pathogen tracking network known as FoodNet. Previously, FoodNet monitored eight different pathogens, including Cyclospora. However, it now only mandates reporting for two: Salmonella and E. coli.
It is deeply ironic that under an administration that has stated its intentions to “Make America Healthy Again,” millions of Americans are now being advised to avoid eating lettuce and raw produce. Trump’s mission to gut the federal government and deregulate the agricultural industry, far from improving the health of Americans, can only lead to more outbreaks of foodborne illness.
However, this is not the fault of the Trump administration alone. A report from the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) demonstrated that cases of foodborne illness in the US in 2024 increased compared to 2023, with the number of hospitalizations and deaths being more than doubled.
Critically, 98% of illnesses could be traced to just 13 of the 296 total food recalls that year. As our food production has shifted away from small-scale, local production towards massive agribusiness behemoths like Taylor Farms which dominate the food supply, foodborne illness has similarly transitioned from local outbreaks to regional, or even national, epidemics.
Capitalism is the parasite
Every other day, there seems to be a new food product being recalled from grocery store shelves. Whether this is due to contamination by pathogens or, in the case of retailers like Trader Joe’s, the presence of glass in frozen fried rice, it is abundantly clear that ‘food safety’ for corporations is more of a light suggestion than a mandatory requirement.
In fact, capitalist food producers have been disregarding the health and safety of working people for hundreds of years. Karl Marx noted in Capital, published in 1867, how English workers were consuming bread contaminated by “a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead cockroaches…” alongside minerals like alum and sand. As workers in food production today face unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, and federal deregulation lets agribusiness off the hook, Marx’s description of Victorian England sounds all too contemporary.
Corporations like Taylor Farms, and other agribusiness enterprises like it, are in an endless pursuit of profit. For them, food is a commodity to be bought and sold. They seek ever-increasing control of the food supply, not in order to guarantee there are no empty stomachs, but to make the biggest buck for their shareholders. Contaminated food is just a hiccup in their operations; they recall the product, issue their sincerest apology, and do nothing to prevent the next inevitable outbreak.
Socialism is the cure
This shameful state of capitalist food production is not sustainable. There is no reason that working people in the US should be exposed to parasitic infections, shards of glass, or any other contaminated food when they sit down to eat dinner.
It is possible to avoid future public health disasters like this Cyclospora outbreak. Socialism, where society is organized to meet the needs of people and the planet, would put workers in control of the food they eat. A socialist government would work to ensure that food is clean, nutritious, and accessible to everyone. It would guarantee the rights of workers to a safe and sanitary working environment. It would implement a robust public health infrastructure to monitor and prevent outbreaks of foodborne illness. In short, socialism would wrest control of our food from private agribusiness, and enshrine access to healthy food for all as a basic human right.
Featured image: CDC′s Roybal campus in Atlanta, GA, Wikimedia Commons
