Dear Bruce,

I read your October 8 letter. You say Taylor Farms will “indefinitely suspend the harvesting and processing of iceberg lettuce from central Mexico” for sale in the United States and Canada during the Cyclospora season, and that the company will join “a public-private task force that includes the FDA, scientists, industry leaders” and public health officials to find “lasting prevention measures for all fresh produce growers.” Your letter came six days after FDA closed its investigation of the shredded iceberg lettuce outbreak at 12,883 confirmed illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths in 21 states, with the last illness beginning August 17.

I have spent a good part of this summer and fall criticizing what your company has said about this outbreak, and I represent people who were sickened by it. I want to say plainly that your letter does something the earlier statements did not: it changes what the company will do, not just what it says. Stopping the central Mexico iceberg harvest during the rainy season is the single most protective step a lettuce company could take on its own, and nobody made you take it. That deserves to be said first. The letter also leaves things out, and I will get to those. But the part worth stopping on is the task force, because a task force is only as good as its agenda, and I have been writing that agenda since July. Here it is, sorted by who has to act. You can put it on the table at the first meeting.

Your letter commits to four things, and the harvest pause is the one that matters.

You say the company will not harvest or process central Mexico iceberg for the U.S. and Canadian markets during the CDC-defined U.S. Cyclospora season, “which mirrors the rainy season in central Mexico”; that it is “expanding existing year-round health monitoring and increasing irrigation water and crop testing in central Mexico”; that it is “leading and investing in new research and technology to improve Cyclospora detection and prevention tools”; and that it will join the task force and “continue to collaborate with the FDA as it implements its Cyclospora Prevention, Response and Research Action Plan,” with updates at taylorfarms.com. The pause is the one that counts. Monitoring, testing, research and task forces are inputs. Not harvesting iceberg lettuce in central Mexico between May 1 and August 31 is an outcome, and it is the one step that would have prevented this outbreak if it had been in place on June 29, when the recalled lettuce started shipping.

Your letter does not name the months, does not count the sick, and does not mention the two positive samples.

The letter never gives a date. It borrows CDC’s definition of the season, which CDC states as May 1 through August 31, but a reader would not know that, and it does not say whether “indefinitely” means 2027 or every year. It never says how many people got sick: FDA’s final count is 12,883 ill, 570 hospitalized and two dead, both in Michigan, and CDC’s season count, which includes thousands of illnesses never tied to any food, stands at 19,883 confirmed cases, 1,064 hospitalizations and two deaths in 49 states and the District of Columbia as of September 15. And it quotes FDA’s closing line, that “there is currently not enough evidence to conclusively determine how contamination occurred,” without the finding before it: FDA’s inspectors found Cyclospora in a tank holding outgoing wastewater at your Taylor Farms de Mexico processing facility and in a drainage ditch at one of the iceberg growers in the traceback. No lettuce tested positive, and your company’s information hubstill leads with that. I wrote on October 4 about why a negative lettuce test has never been the standard for CDC, FDA, USDA or your own trade groups. Your letter does not repeat that argument, which is progress. It does not retire it either.

The task force has 205 days. Start with the eight things you can do without asking anyone.

Everything on this part of the list is within your own control, and most of it your company has already said it does in some form.

1. Put the harvest pause in writing: the dates, the products, the markets, what counts as central Mexico, and what would end it. A policy that lives in a letter can be reversed by a letter.

2. Test water for the parasite, not for a stand-in. Your website describes water testing for “indicator organisms.” FDA’s fact sheet says generic E. coli and fecal coliform testing will not identify Cyclospora cayetanensis. Test for the organism with FDA’s BAM methods and for human fecal markers such as HF183, and publish the results by ranch, source and date.

3. Publish the 2013 results. In August 2013, after the salad-mix outbreak traced to the same Doctor Mora region, FDA let your plant resume shipping on a sampling plan covering product and water, and you told reporters the company had tested its water sources and raw product. Thirteen years later I could not find one public result. Your company says roughly 2,000 samples taken in central Mexico since May 2026 were negative. Say what they were, where they came from and what method was used, and do the same for 2013.

4. Close the loop on wastewater. FDA found the parasite in a tank of outgoing wastewater at your plant. Say where that water went, whether it could reach a field, a canal or a product line, and what has changed so that it cannot.

5. Deal with the open holding ponds. FDA’s 2013 environmental assessment described ranches pumping deep well water into elevated holding ponds, some unlined. Well water that sits in an open pond in a warm climate is no longer well water in any risk sense. Line them, cover them, or treat the water at the point of use with something validated against parasites, not chlorine validated against bacteria.

6. Redo the hazard analysis the 2013 assessment asked for. Recommendation #2 told the firm to decide whether Cyclospora is a reasonably likely hazard in the region and re-evaluate the wash step. FDA’s August 2026 fresh-cut guidance now says no known antimicrobial controls Cyclospora and that control has to come through the supply chain. Under 21 CFR 117.170 that is new hazard information, and it requires a reanalysis. Publish it.

7. Verify worker sanitation and publish the audits. Toilets, handwashing, worker health screening, sick-leave practice and the water those facilities use, checked by an independent auditor, on every ranch that supplies the plant. Western Growers’ own CEO has said the industry should open its doors wider. Start here.

8. Build lot-level traceability now. Your company says it already has field-to-shipment chain of custody that allows real-time traceback. If so, the 2028 compliance date for the FDA traceability rule costs you nothing, and you should say so to Congress.

The industry groups you belong to can do four things before the next season without a single new regulation.

I wrote on October 3 about what the produce industry got right after spinach, got wrong, and should do next. Your company helped create the California and Arizona Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements and co-founded the Center for Produce Safety. Those groups, Western Growers and the International Fresh Produce Association built real things after 2006. They can build these, and you are in a position to ask.

9. Sign one letter asking Congress to repeal the enforcement bar on the FDA Food Traceability Rule and let FDA enforce it on a near-term date, before the 2027 leafy greens season. IFPA has said on the record it opposed the delay. The LGMAs and Western Growers should say it in writing, and FMI and NGA, which applauded the delay to July 20, 2028, should withdraw that applause. Growers, packers and buyers should comply now; Western Growers already has a guidance document.

10. Write a Cyclospora water standard into the LGMA metrics without waiting for FDA. The LGMA already requires treatment of surface water applied overhead near harvest, but the treatment is validated against generic E. coli. Water treatment is already mandatory; it is aimed at the wrong organism. Add parasite testing of growing and processing water, starting in regions with outbreak history, and make the LGMA standard the floor for anything sold under a member’s name, wherever it is grown.

11. Agree now on data sharing. Shipping records, sourcing and test data, including Western Growers’ GreenLink testing, delivered to CDC and FDA within hours of a request, not after a negotiation. This outbreak was recognized in early July and the recall came July 17; the days in between were the days the lettuce was eaten.

12. Stop arguing with the epidemiologists and stop funding the deflection. The industry paid for the research showing Cyclospora is endemic in U.S. wastewater and irrigation water. It should not also be the industry that tells state health departments to look at swimming pools. Put the Center for Produce Safety’s next dollars into a validated parasite kill step or water treatment and into an in vitro culture method, because every inactivation study we have rides on a surrogate organism.

FDA has ten commitments. Ask it for the six that bind.

I wrote on October 7 that FDA’s post-outbreak plan is a start and that none of its ten items requires a grower, packer or importer to change a practice before next summer. The plan promises surveillance, outreach, training, lab capacity in Mexico, weather data, expert panels, one genotyping standard, more Foreign Supplier Verification Program inspections and an investigation report with no date. You will be across the table from FDA on this task force. Here is what to ask for, most of it under authority the agency already has.

13. Name the parasite in the water rule. The agricultural water provisions of the Produce Safety Rule carry one numeric microbial criterion, generic E. coli, and the 2024 pre-harvest rule replaced numeric testing with a systems-based assessment. Ask for a numeric standard for pre-harvest and processing water on raw-eaten produce, parasite testing where Cyclospora has been found, and use of the assessment’s reach over adjacent land and human sewage sources, which already covers a swimming resort a few hundred feet from a plant.

14. Fix the fresh-cut guidance. The August 2026 draft says in one section that bacterial controls will in many cases control Cyclospora and in another that no antimicrobial works. It does not cite FDA’s own BAM 19b and 19c detection methods and does not name Mexico among endemic regions. The docket is open. Ask FDA to say what processors must test and where.

15. Enforce equivalence at the border. The FSVP expansion in FDA’s plan should require importers of Food Traceability List produce from regions with Cyclospora history to show parasite-specific water testing and worker sanitation verification, not a certificate that the supplier tests for generic E. coli. You import from one of those regions. Ask for the standard that applies to your competitors too.

16. Stop treating the name of an implicated firm as confidential. FDA kept Taylor Farms de Mexico’s name out of its advisories until your own recall supplied it, it still has not named the seed supplier in either of this fall’s sprout outbreaks, and on October 7 it named “ready-to-eat multi-ingredient chicken wraps” as the vehicle in a 38-person E. coli O157:H7 outbreak without naming a manufacturer, a brand, a retailer or a state, because the wraps were “proactively removed” and never called a recall. I am drafting two citizen petitions on exactly this, and I am asking you to read them before I file them. They get their own section below.

17. Put surveillance where the parasite lives. CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System covers roughly half the country for respiratory viruses and does not test for Cyclospora. Ask that it be added, and ask CDC to restore required FoodNet reporting for Cyclospora, which it made optional on July 1, 2025, so that next year’s count is a count and not a guess.

18. Ask FDA to use Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act to get onto implicated animal feeding operations and sample, once the agency determines in writing that an operation is implicated in a multistate outbreak. Eight years after Yuma there is still no enforceable setback between a feedlot and a canal, and FDA still has no standing right to walk onto the feedlot. That is the subject of my third petition, and a grower’s signature on it would carry more weight than mine.

Congress holds the money and the traceability delay, and you have been to Washington before.

19. Ask Congress to strike the appropriations language that bars FDA from enforcing the Food Traceability Rule before July 20, 2028. The delay was announced by FDA and then written into the November 2025 appropriations act. One sentence put it there; one sentence takes it out. You have said your company already complies. Say that to the subcommittee.

20. Ask Congress to rebuild the trip wire. USDA’s Microbiological Data Program sampled produce at distribution centers for about $5 million a year and triggered 23 recalls in 2010 and 2011 before it was zeroed out in 2012, seven months before FDA first walked into Doctor Mora. It tested for bacteria, so it would not have caught Cyclospora; the honest version is that we dismantled the program we had and never built one for the parasite. A successor that tests for both would cost less than one week of this outbreak.

21. Ask Congress to fund the people who find outbreaks. State and local health departments do most produce inspections and every retail inspection, and they are the ones who recognized this outbreak. Restore the state and local public health money, fund state labs to run Cyclospora stool tests for outbreak specimens at no charge to the clinic, and fund the sequencing and genotyping that turned 12,883 scattered illnesses into one outbreak.

22. Support an independent outbreak investigation board on the NTSB model, with a clock. The 2013 environmental assessment’s Recommendation #2 had no addressee, no deadline and no one tracking it, which is how it could sit for thirteen years. A board with a 90-day response requirement, a public docket and a mandatory launch trigger for multistate outbreaks would have had this summer’s findings in public before the next season instead of in a report with no date. Your company would be a party to those investigations, with access and without a vote, the way an airline is at the NTSB.

23. Answer the letters. Fourteen congressional letters went to FDA, CDC, HHS and Taylor Farms this summer, and most of the deadlines passed without an answer. Yours is the one you control.

Two draft citizen petitions I am asking you and the leafy greens industry to read, improve and support before I file them.

Both are drafts, dated October 8, 2026, the day of your letter, and both will go to FDA under 21 CFR 10.30. I have not filed them. I am still taking comments, and I would rather fix what I got wrong now than argue about it on the docket later. Neither asks for a new testing regime or a new cost on a grower. Each asks FDA to tell the public what it already knows, which is the one reform that costs the honest company nothing and costs the whole industry a great deal when it is missing.

The first draft asks FDA to establish by rule that the identity of a firm implicated in a foodborne illness outbreak by epidemiologic, traceback, laboratory or whole genome sequencing evidence is not confidential commercial information under 21 CFR 20.61, with the burden on the firm to show otherwise on the record; to reach the grower, harvester, cooler, processor, distributor, importer and retailer, not only the consumer-facing brand, because lettuce moves from field to plate with no logo on it; to use the authority FDA already holds under section 705(b) of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to name implicated firms now, whether or not product remains in commerce and whether or not there is a recall; and to publish, while an investigation is open, the suspect food, the ingredients under investigation, the states, the hospitalizations and the HUS cases. FDA has named farms, processors and brands in exactly these circumstances at least eight times since 2006. What is missing is a written standard, and the petition supplies one.

The second draft asks FDA to amend 21 CFR part 7 to publish the retail consignee list in every Class I food recall, on the model USDA adopted for meat and poultry in 2008 at 9 CFR 390.10; to publish it when the recall is announced and update it; to reach restaurants, schools, hospitals and other institutional consignees, where unbranded produce actually goes; to classify every recall within ten calendar days and publish the interval; and to treat the removal of an outbreak-implicated food as a recall for these purposes whether the firm calls it a recall, a market withdrawal or a proactive removal. Congress told FDA in 2011 to consider the USDA policy. FDA agreed with it in substance and wrote a guidance that applies in some cases. A consumer who bought recalled ground beef can find out whether their store received it. A consumer who bought recalled bagged salad usually cannot.

Here is why these are your petitions as much as mine. When FDA will not name the firm, the whole commodity wears the outbreak. In 2018 the industry asked the country to stop eating all romaine because no one could say whose romaine it was. This summer, every grower of iceberg lettuce who had nothing to do with central Mexico lost sales for weeks because the advisory said “iceberg lettuce” before it said Taylor Farms de Mexico. A written naming standard protects the companies that are not implicated. A consignee list tells a shopper in Ohio that their store never carried the product. Transparency is not a penalty on the industry; secrecy is. You and the LGMAs, Western Growers, IFPA and the Center for Produce Safety can engage now, while they are drafts: tell me what is wrong with them, what the industry would need changed to sign, and what I have missed. When they are filed, support them by co-signing, by filing comments on the docket, or by writing FDA on your own letterhead saying that the leafy greens industry wants to be named when it is implicated and cleared when it is not. I will send both drafts to you and to anyone in the industry who asks, and I will post them here when they are ready.

None of this is new. It is the list your industry asked for in July, in one place, with names next to each item.

I wrote the short version in July as Reap What You Sow, when the count was a tenth of what it became, and I wrote the same month that there is no kill step for Cyclospora, which is why this whole list is about keeping the parasite out of the water and off the field rather than washing it off the lettuce. On October 8, the day of your letter, I published ten ways to win back public faith in the food safety system; the items above are the lettuce-specific version.

Your task force has no roster, no chair and no date. If you want it to be more than a sentence in a letter, publish all three, put this list on the table, and report on May 1, 2027 which items are done. Since 1993 I have read a great many company statements after outbreaks. Most say the company is cooperating and stands behind its food. Yours says the company will stop doing the thing that got people sick, for the months when it gets people sick. That is a better letter than most. The 12,883 people in FDA’s count, and the families of the two who died, are owed the rest of it: the dates, the numbers, the test results and the names. I will be reading taylorfarms.com for the updates you promised, and I will report what is there. Read the two draft petitions, tell me what to fix, and bring the industry with you when they are filed. If the task force wants a victims’ representative at the table, I know several who would come.

Sincerely,

Bill Marler