RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesWhy does food feel scary in 2026? d3sign/Getty Images
In 2026, Americans were warned about Cyclospora in lettuce, E. coli in berries, and Salmonella in jalapeños.
There are four main factors driving this barrage of recalls.
New technology and climate each play a role.
Bill Marler's business is booming — and that's not great for the rest of us.
Marler is a food safety lawyer, defending people who've been sickened by foodborne illness . He has been doing this for 33 years, with such high-profile wins that he's become a towering figure in the food safety world.
This year, he's so slammed with foodborne-illness cases that, for the first time in years, he's expanding his team — hiring another lawyer and a couple of paralegals. "We just have too much shit to do," Marler said.
This summer alone, Americans have been warned about a massive Cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce — 10,930 confirmed illnesses, 454 hospitalizations, and two deaths — plus Salmonella in jalapeños and eggs and E. coli in frozen blueberries . Then there are the recalls: bread that may contain metal fragments, fruit bars that may contain glass, and foods pulled for possible bacterial contamination or undeclared allergens.
By August, the FDA's 2026 public health advisories had covered what felt like everything, from cheese to infant formula.
"As a consumer, you're looking at this like, well, what the hell's safe to eat?" Marler said.
America is having a headline-grabbing food-safety summer. Some of that is perception: We're better at finding outbreaks, and recall counts can be misleading.
But long-standing vulnerabilities in our food system — compounded by cuts to the public health infrastructure designed to catch problems — are also at play. Whether it represents something more significant is harder to say.
"It's real, and it looks bad," Marler said.
Recall counts can be misleading
This summer looks more exceptional than it actually is, said Craig Hedberg, a professor and foodborne-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota.
"Certainly the magnitude of the cyclospora outbreak is unprecedented, but in terms of all of the things that are going on with food, it's not all that unusual," Hedberg said.
Summer is typically a busy season for foodborne illness, he said, and outbreaks involving foods like sprouts, berries, and produce recur year after year. What's truly extraordinary in 2026 is cyclospora — "an order of magnitude bigger than anything we've seen in previous years."
Berry recalls are not uncommon in summer. FlorianTM/Getty Images
Recall counts can also exaggerate the number of distinct problems. Jennifer McEntire, founder of Food Safety Strategy, a consulting firm that works with industry groups, pointed out that when a single contaminated ingredient is used in many foods, each finished product may trigger its own recall.
"This makes the recall numbers look high, even though the number of 'root causes' may be much lower," McEntire said.
Take California Dairies, which recalled certain bulk batches of powdered milk and buttermilk in April due to potential Salmonella contamination . These products had been sold to wholesale distributors and manufacturers, triggering downstream recalls.
That meant the recall rippled across the sector, with over a dozen products pulled from shelves — from potato chips to ranch seasoning.
We're finding issues we couldn't find before
There's another reason today's food-safety problems may be more visible: We're better at finding them.
E. coli and Salmonella can be grown and tested in a lab, making it easier to connect the dots between illnesses. Anchalee Phanmaha/Getty Images
"We clearly have better tools and are using them more effectively to identify outbreaks," Hedberg said.
In the last five to 10 years, public health laboratories have increasingly used whole-genome sequencing to link seemingly isolated Salmonella or E. coli cases by their genetic fingerprints.
That means some of what appears to be an increase in foodborne illness is actually better surveillance. "We're finding ones that may have been missed previously," said Melanie Firestone, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, who studies foodborne-disease surveillance .
Those tools, however, aren't as readily available for Cyclospora, in part because the parasite can't be grown in a lab; investigators rely more heavily on finding common exposures among sick people.
Our food system has changed — and one mistake can go a very long way
The food system itself has also transformed. Americans can now buy fresh produce year-round, including fruits and vegetables .
"Foods don't go out of season. We just go to the season where they're being produced, and we bring them in," Hedberg said.
Still, a food system optimized for year-round availability, convenience, long supply chains, and massive distribution networks can also amplify failures.
Lettuce grown in Mexico can be sold in US grocery stores. Bloomberg/Getty Images
Marler points to the massive 2006 E. coli outbreak linked to bagged spinach, a crisis so consequential that he said the leafy-greens industry came to refer to it as its "9/11."
Investigators traced the spinach to a single 20-acre farm that had a wild-pig invasion. Not every crop was infected, but harvesting and processing allowed it to spread. The bags were then shipped around the country, turning what Marler argued might once have been scattered illnesses into a national outbreak.
Ultimately, when something does go wrong, the modern food system can make it go spectacularly wrong.
"The reality is that with a lot of our fresh produce, once contamination occurs, we have limited ability to decontaminate the produce items," Hedberg said.
Parts of our safety net weakened
One explanation for the increased number of headlines about food safety has loomed particularly large this summer: the Trump administration's DOGE cuts.
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