I've been tracking this and it is such an aggravating and depressing PITA. Pun not intended but coincidentally very appropriate. Oh, and I live in Michigan, the state with the highest documented...
I've been tracking this and it is such an aggravating and depressing PITA. Pun not intended but coincidentally very appropriate.
Oh, and I live in Michigan, the state with the highest documented concentration of infections. How nice!
My stepmother who lives with my father an hour north of me got sick with this, they were both eating Dole and Taylor Farms bagged salads (not confirmed as the cause) and I was eating a Taylor Farms bagged salad as part of my breakfast every day - it had been a great help in me improving my diet and lowering daily calorie intake. But bagged salads are one of the highest risk produce products you can get (I believe Raspberries are #1 due to the issue of crevices serving to resist effective washing).
One of the more eclectic YouTubers I watch sometimes, Farm to Taber, did a livestream about this subject yesterday and I caught the tail end of it. She is a small farmer / ex farm worker / crop scientist / former food safety auditor. Pretty informative and helps explain things like why tracking down the cause of the current outbreak is so difficult right now (big parts are a combination of 'do you remember everything you ate for all your meals from the past 2 weeks' and 'surely if we de-fund public health, food safety, federal enforcement of such and more nothing bad will happen, all that money was being wasted!').
I'm considering trying to stir-fry my remaining bagged salads and expect it to look soggy, sad, and wilted. Sigh. I really didn't want to deal with not being able to trust if the food I buy at a major grocery store is safe or not.
The only truly effective prevention method is to not introduce human sewage / human fecal matter into any point of the growing / harvesting / processing chain of our produce. And yes - specifically Human fecal matter. That was fun to learn - it's not that we're missing bird/insect/rabbit/deer poop or whatever - it's human poop. ...yay. Source example FDA.gov: "Cyclosporiasis occurs only in humans, the only known host for C. cayetanensis."
Update: I still had 4 Taylor Farms bagged salads in my fridge. I genuinely enjoy nearly all of their varieties, but I think the Dill & Radish is my favorite. Still want to have vegetables in my diet... with rock bottom expectations and already hungry what with my normal meal cycle disrupted by this and trying to figure out what to eat, I put some olive oil on cast iron and stir-fried my damn salad. Including the dressing, because the dressing has Dill and herbs are a high-risk vector for this. It looks like sadness. It... isn't the worst thing ever I guess... Some of the dressing flavor survived the cooking, and I am hungry. Remains to be seen if I can accept eating my greens like this or if I need to source different options.
I just spent a week in Michigan at a property on well water where the cold water smelled like shit and the hot water smelled like sulfur (but was apparently safe). Never have I wanted to wash my...
I just spent a week in Michigan at a property on well water where the cold water smelled like shit and the hot water smelled like sulfur (but was apparently safe). Never have I wanted to wash my hands more while wanting to turn on the water less. I'm so happy to be back where there is clean, cold tap water.
Fortunately where I am the tap water is clean. I still run it through a filter pitcher for what I drink and make coffee with, but that's more personal habit rather than necessity here. Icky...
Fortunately where I am the tap water is clean. I still run it through a filter pitcher for what I drink and make coffee with, but that's more personal habit rather than necessity here. Icky experience you're describing, I wouldn't want to deal with that... especially if it literally smelled like shit. Ick.
Yeah. I'm frugal enough (and have ingrained habits from when I was genuinely poor and would never waste food) that I don't want to throw out the salads - thus the sad stir-fry. I'll plan on...
Yeah. I'm frugal enough (and have ingrained habits from when I was genuinely poor and would never waste food) that I don't want to throw out the salads - thus the sad stir-fry. I'll plan on something more appropriate for the current situation when I need to restock my veggies for the week. Probably alternate stir fry and some baked mix of broccoli/asparagus with oil/lemon/parmesan/pepper. I've made that last one before and it's yum - but I will miss the minimal-effort dump-salad-into-bowl & ready.
Higher calories due to the oil with fry and bake options (less with bake) but still healthier than just not having veggies.
I don’t have one either, but I have a convection oven. They make baskets you can use in one of those to emulate an air fryer. It’s not perfect, but I makes fantastic veggies, French fries, and...
I don’t have one either, but I have a convection oven. They make baskets you can use in one of those to emulate an air fryer. It’s not perfect, but I makes fantastic veggies, French fries, and chicken.
The key to stir frying leafy vegetables is to not turn it into steamed vegetables. The later is really easy - they have a lot of water in them, and home cooking utensils are small and the heat is...
I'm considering trying to stir-fry my remaining bagged salads and expect it to look soggy, sad, and wilted.
The key to stir frying leafy vegetables is to not turn it into steamed vegetables. The later is really easy - they have a lot of water in them, and home cooking utensils are small and the heat is low.
Stir fryed cabbage is a staple Chinese dish and in restaurants it’s done with a very large open fire and a very large wok. The key is that you need to make sure that enough of the inherent water is turning to steam fast enough that the oil can be at frying temperatures and not locked to 100C because half of the frying pan is water.
More realistically, here’s what do as a home chef. One is that after you wash them, pop them onto a hot pan without any oil. The aim of this step is not to cook it, but to get the rinse water off. Remove once they look dry.
The second is to cook in batches, making sure that there is plenty of space for water to fuck off.
Air fryers are also fairly good at it. The convection from the fan moves the steam away and increases vaporization rates.
Blanched greens are pretty decent as well, as a low cal alternative: add a bit of oyster sauce and it's less sad than cooked salad. No calories from dressing even. If you're feeling fancy, little...
Blanched greens are pretty decent as well, as a low cal alternative: add a bit of oyster sauce and it's less sad than cooked salad. No calories from dressing even.
If you're feeling fancy, little bit of flavouring like Weipa, or in addition to oyster sauce add tiny bit of sesame oil and sesame seed at the end.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat has a good framework for understanding salad. If you're looking to not... whatever this causes... the book is great for understanding how to quickly throw...
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat has a good framework for understanding salad. If you're looking to not... whatever this causes... the book is great for understanding how to quickly throw together a bagged salad in a Tupperware (boxed salad?) with about 20 minutes of weekly meal prep. I used this to stick to an extreme calorie cut about 10 years ago.
It's a great book and cooking resource. Got it as a gift last year and read through it. Really good resource for learning how to build a recipe by understanding how ingredients interact without...
It's a great book and cooking resource. Got it as a gift last year and read through it. Really good resource for learning how to build a recipe by understanding how ingredients interact without having a pre-written recipe!
Salads can work quite well in soup. Using lettuce in soup is pretty common in both eastern European and eastern Asian cuisines. I think it'll work better than stir-fry for you.
Salads can work quite well in soup. Using lettuce in soup is pretty common in both eastern European and eastern Asian cuisines. I think it'll work better than stir-fry for you.
I tried the soup method. It was.... not actively bad. I was hungry at the time which helped of course. I wouldn't call it particularly good, more it was just another way to not waste / still...
I tried the soup method. It was.... not actively bad. I was hungry at the time which helped of course. I wouldn't call it particularly good, more it was just another way to not waste / still intake salad greens.
This morning I tried another stir fry (the dill pickle salad again - my last remaining salad), but I cooked a can of garbanzo beans in olive oil on my skillet first, with pepper, ginger, and a little salt - then dumped the salad and everything it comes with into the skillet on top of that. It was definitely better, the seasoned garbanzo beans added a solid protein source + improved the average texture of the dish. If I was planning any variant of this I would not be using a bagged salad of course, but it was definitely better with the seasoned garbanzo beans.
Decent public news article here, with more information than the CDC is capable of providing these days. U.S. federal data collection and response for Cyclospora, which might have stopped the...
Decent public news article here, with more information than the CDC is capable of providing these days.
U.S. federal data collection and response for Cyclospora, which might have stopped the outbreak earlier, was lost due to Trump's budget cuts. Welcome to the ensuing literal shitshow.
Also a Michigander here... Michigan still has a functioning public health department and part of the high reported cyclosporiasis case count is that the state is actually testing for it. It's summer, diarrhoeal illness prevalence increases at this time of year anyway. Without testing, there's no way to know for certain which of a dozen different common pathogens caused your stomach bug.
The true case count is likely much higher than reported, here and elsewhere. Not everyone gets sick enough to go to the doctor, doctors don't test everyone, not everyone who's infected sheds enough of the parasite to show up in testing. DNA testing for the Cyclospora parasite isn't as advanced as testing for other reportable bacterial and viral pathogens, so it's harder to isolate the outbreak source.
I'm extra anxious because we've had a huge influx of tourists and many of the area's lakeside properties have old, leaky septic systems. Cyclospora can be contracted from contaminated water as well as food, so some of the cases can be coming from swimming or other dirty water contacts. Farmers here often irrigate with accessible but untreated surface waters (though it's been rainy enough that they haven't had to yet).
Between being immunosuppressed and allergic to the one antibiotic that works for Cyclospora treatment, I'm off uncooked greens, herbs, and soft fruits for the duration of the outbreak.
I started following “Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE)” during COVID. They recently did a post on this too that might be of interest (through Substack). Key bits quoted below, for those who don’t...
I started following “Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE)” during COVID. They recently did a post on this too that might be of interest (through Substack). Key bits quoted below, for those who don’t want to click through to Substack.
For context, the U.S. typically sees around 3,000-4,000 cyclosporiasis cases in an entire year—so this single outbreak has already matched a normal year’s total, and it’s still climbing.
…
Michigan has the most cases—more than 1,600 confirmed—but that doesn’t mean it started there. It is more likely to mean Michigan is better resourced for testing, reporting, and epidemiological legwork, so more of its cases are getting caught and counted.
…
How did the contamination start? Still unclear. Broadly, there are two possibilities: contamination at the farm level (poor field sanitation, such as workers without adequate bathroom access, or contaminated irrigation water) or contamination during processing (typically via contaminated water at the packing or washing stage
…
I know most of us would like to avoid having explosive diarrhea, but keep in mind that the risk is low (much lower than getting norovirus right now). Produce is healthy for you, and there are ways we can lower the risk without cutting it out completely.
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Avoid the bagged or boxed salads for now
…
Until a source is confirmed, lean toward produce with the least human handling
…
Washing [with just water] helps, but it won’t fully remove the parasite. […] Cooking will kill it, though I recognize “just cook your salad” isn’t a satisfying solution.
…
Is this deadly? It hardly ever is. Most cases are mild, and severe cases can be treated. CDC is reporting 86 people hospitalized and no deaths.
Canadian public health: So not only is there a lot of human poop on our produce, it's specifically old human poop that's making people sick. Great. Ew. How hard can it possibly be to build...
food can be a source of cyclosporiasis for Canadians when imported from countries where Cyclospora is common. Foods imported to Canada that have been linked to the Cyclospora parasite include:
basil
cilantro
raspberries
blackberries
mesclun lettuce
snow and snap peas
pre-packaged salad mix
Cyclosporiasis is unlikely to spread directly between people. This is because the parasite can only infect others once it leaves your body through feces. To be able to spread, the parasite needs to be outside the body for about 7 to 15 days.
So not only is there a lot of human poop on our produce, it's specifically old human poop that's making people sick. Great. Ew.
How hard can it possibly be to build outhouses for farm workers??? (very because capitalism) Is there also some kind of grudge against eventual buyers that makes it more likely for disgruntled workers to wish for us to literally eat shit? This is a disease that isn't be possible for short distance food distributions and decent sanitation standards.
I agree, of course. But I assume there are bathrooms available somewhere. But they are located too far away from the moving tractors that serve as work sites, and workers are not allotted enough...
How hard can it possibly be to build outhouses for farm workers??? (very because capitalism)
I agree, of course. But I assume there are bathrooms available somewhere. But they are located too far away from the moving tractors that serve as work sites, and workers are not allotted enough break time to access them. Kind of similar to Amazon warehouse bathroom issues.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/taco-bell-lettuce-supplied-by-taylor-farms-linked-us-cyclosporiasis-outbreak-2026-07-16/ Not good, especially since Taylor Farms lettuce...
I've been tracking this and it is such an aggravating and depressing PITA. Pun not intended but coincidentally very appropriate.
Oh, and I live in Michigan, the state with the highest documented concentration of infections. How nice!
My stepmother who lives with my father an hour north of me got sick with this, they were both eating Dole and Taylor Farms bagged salads (not confirmed as the cause) and I was eating a Taylor Farms bagged salad as part of my breakfast every day - it had been a great help in me improving my diet and lowering daily calorie intake. But bagged salads are one of the highest risk produce products you can get (I believe Raspberries are #1 due to the issue of crevices serving to resist effective washing).
One of the more eclectic YouTubers I watch sometimes, Farm to Taber, did a livestream about this subject yesterday and I caught the tail end of it. She is a small farmer / ex farm worker / crop scientist / former food safety auditor. Pretty informative and helps explain things like why tracking down the cause of the current outbreak is so difficult right now (big parts are a combination of 'do you remember everything you ate for all your meals from the past 2 weeks' and 'surely if we de-fund public health, food safety, federal enforcement of such and more nothing bad will happen, all that money was being wasted!').
I'm considering trying to stir-fry my remaining bagged salads and expect it to look soggy, sad, and wilted. Sigh. I really didn't want to deal with not being able to trust if the food I buy at a major grocery store is safe or not.
Apparently Cyclospora oocysts are incredibly resistant to washing and don't get inactivated / killed / removed with our standard methods like Chlorine rinses. Link to a study comparing various washing methods which cites the methods used, while reasonably to highly effective for other parasites, were drastically less effective for Cyclospora.
The only truly effective prevention method is to not introduce human sewage / human fecal matter into any point of the growing / harvesting / processing chain of our produce. And yes - specifically Human fecal matter. That was fun to learn - it's not that we're missing bird/insect/rabbit/deer poop or whatever - it's human poop. ...yay. Source example FDA.gov: "Cyclosporiasis occurs only in humans, the only known host for C. cayetanensis."
Update: I still had 4 Taylor Farms bagged salads in my fridge. I genuinely enjoy nearly all of their varieties, but I think the Dill & Radish is my favorite. Still want to have vegetables in my diet... with rock bottom expectations and already hungry what with my normal meal cycle disrupted by this and trying to figure out what to eat, I put some olive oil on cast iron and stir-fried my damn salad. Including the dressing, because the dressing has Dill and herbs are a high-risk vector for this. It looks like sadness. It... isn't the worst thing ever I guess... Some of the dressing flavor survived the cooking, and I am hungry. Remains to be seen if I can accept eating my greens like this or if I need to source different options.
I just spent a week in Michigan at a property on well water where the cold water smelled like shit and the hot water smelled like sulfur (but was apparently safe). Never have I wanted to wash my hands more while wanting to turn on the water less. I'm so happy to be back where there is clean, cold tap water.
Fortunately where I am the tap water is clean. I still run it through a filter pitcher for what I drink and make coffee with, but that's more personal habit rather than necessity here. Icky experience you're describing, I wouldn't want to deal with that... especially if it literally smelled like shit. Ick.
Different types available, but frozen veggies stir fry nicely and are still all cut up for you.
Yeah. I'm frugal enough (and have ingrained habits from when I was genuinely poor and would never waste food) that I don't want to throw out the salads - thus the sad stir-fry. I'll plan on something more appropriate for the current situation when I need to restock my veggies for the week. Probably alternate stir fry and some baked mix of broccoli/asparagus with oil/lemon/parmesan/pepper. I've made that last one before and it's yum - but I will miss the minimal-effort dump-salad-into-bowl & ready.
Higher calories due to the oil with fry and bake options (less with bake) but still healthier than just not having veggies.
Roasting those is also pretty amazing.
I thought attempting to air fry one of them might have some potential and be worth trying for science, but I lack an air fryer.
I don’t have one either, but I have a convection oven. They make baskets you can use in one of those to emulate an air fryer. It’s not perfect, but I makes fantastic veggies, French fries, and chicken.
Kale chips are delicious, and can probably be made without much oil if you air-fry them.
The key to stir frying leafy vegetables is to not turn it into steamed vegetables. The later is really easy - they have a lot of water in them, and home cooking utensils are small and the heat is low.
Stir fryed cabbage is a staple Chinese dish and in restaurants it’s done with a very large open fire and a very large wok. The key is that you need to make sure that enough of the inherent water is turning to steam fast enough that the oil can be at frying temperatures and not locked to 100C because half of the frying pan is water.
More realistically, here’s what do as a home chef. One is that after you wash them, pop them onto a hot pan without any oil. The aim of this step is not to cook it, but to get the rinse water off. Remove once they look dry.
The second is to cook in batches, making sure that there is plenty of space for water to fuck off.
Air fryers are also fairly good at it. The convection from the fan moves the steam away and increases vaporization rates.
Blanched greens are pretty decent as well, as a low cal alternative: add a bit of oyster sauce and it's less sad than cooked salad. No calories from dressing even.
If you're feeling fancy, little bit of flavouring like Weipa, or in addition to oyster sauce add tiny bit of sesame oil and sesame seed at the end.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat has a good framework for understanding salad. If you're looking to not... whatever this causes... the book is great for understanding how to quickly throw together a bagged salad in a Tupperware (boxed salad?) with about 20 minutes of weekly meal prep. I used this to stick to an extreme calorie cut about 10 years ago.
It's a great book and cooking resource. Got it as a gift last year and read through it. Really good resource for learning how to build a recipe by understanding how ingredients interact without having a pre-written recipe!
Salads can work quite well in soup. Using lettuce in soup is pretty common in both eastern European and eastern Asian cuisines. I think it'll work better than stir-fry for you.
I tried the soup method. It was.... not actively bad. I was hungry at the time which helped of course. I wouldn't call it particularly good, more it was just another way to not waste / still intake salad greens.
This morning I tried another stir fry (the dill pickle salad again - my last remaining salad), but I cooked a can of garbanzo beans in olive oil on my skillet first, with pepper, ginger, and a little salt - then dumped the salad and everything it comes with into the skillet on top of that. It was definitely better, the seasoned garbanzo beans added a solid protein source + improved the average texture of the dish. If I was planning any variant of this I would not be using a bagged salad of course, but it was definitely better with the seasoned garbanzo beans.
Now that is a novel idea to me. I may give that a try, thank you for suggesting this.
Decent public news article here, with more information than the CDC is capable of providing these days.
U.S. federal data collection and response for Cyclospora, which might have stopped the outbreak earlier, was lost due to Trump's budget cuts. Welcome to the ensuing literal shitshow.
Also a Michigander here... Michigan still has a functioning public health department and part of the high reported cyclosporiasis case count is that the state is actually testing for it. It's summer, diarrhoeal illness prevalence increases at this time of year anyway. Without testing, there's no way to know for certain which of a dozen different common pathogens caused your stomach bug.
The true case count is likely much higher than reported, here and elsewhere. Not everyone gets sick enough to go to the doctor, doctors don't test everyone, not everyone who's infected sheds enough of the parasite to show up in testing. DNA testing for the Cyclospora parasite isn't as advanced as testing for other reportable bacterial and viral pathogens, so it's harder to isolate the outbreak source.
I'm extra anxious because we've had a huge influx of tourists and many of the area's lakeside properties have old, leaky septic systems. Cyclospora can be contracted from contaminated water as well as food, so some of the cases can be coming from swimming or other dirty water contacts. Farmers here often irrigate with accessible but untreated surface waters (though it's been rainy enough that they haven't had to yet).
Between being immunosuppressed and allergic to the one antibiotic that works for Cyclospora treatment, I'm off uncooked greens, herbs, and soft fruits for the duration of the outbreak.
I started following “Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE)” during COVID. They recently did a post on this too that might be of interest (through Substack). Key bits quoted below, for those who don’t want to click through to Substack.
https://open.substack.com/pub/yourlocalepidemiologist/p/explosive-foodborne-outbreak
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
Canadian public health:
So not only is there a lot of human poop on our produce, it's specifically old human poop that's making people sick. Great. Ew.
How hard can it possibly be to build outhouses for farm workers??? (very because capitalism) Is there also some kind of grudge against eventual buyers that makes it more likely for disgruntled workers to wish for us to literally eat shit? This is a disease that isn't be possible for short distance food distributions and decent sanitation standards.
I agree, of course. But I assume there are bathrooms available somewhere. But they are located too far away from the moving tractors that serve as work sites, and workers are not allotted enough break time to access them. Kind of similar to Amazon warehouse bathroom issues.
The issue is usually irrigation systems using contaminated water and not a lack of bathrooms.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/taco-bell-lettuce-supplied-by-taylor-farms-linked-us-cyclosporiasis-outbreak-2026-07-16/
Not good, especially since Taylor Farms lettuce is used in all sorts of places.