Right now, if you type the phrase “will this salad” into the Google search bar, Google will attempt to autofill the rest of the vegetal prompt with: “make you poop.” It’s not a bad idea for a children's book title, and it’s a reasonable enough question for an adult to ask a computer if they’re trying to get a handle on this whole thing with “fiber,” 2026’s hottest macronutrient. But a few lines down that search bar, Google's prompts begin to tell a fuller story, a story about mounting fear and anxiety that goes far beyond the standard salad-to-pooping pipeline. In the summer of 2026, our fresh produce–yearning society isn’t just wondering whether our simple summer niçoise will make us do a no. 2. We’re wondering … whether it’ll make us do a no. 3.
“Will this salad”—I whisper into the internet—“GIVE YOU DIARRHEA,” the internet screams back. Yes, it very well could.
The United States is currently facing its largest-ever outbreak of cyclospora, a single-celled parasite that spreads through contaminated food and water—most commonly, via fresh produce—and infects only humans. What does it cause? Diarrhea, mostly. The now highly memed symptoms of cyclospora are, as David Relman, a professor of medicine, microbiology, and immunology at Stanford Medicine, puts it: nausea, fatigue, and “watery diarrhea like all get-out.” But the difference between the “explosive bowel movements” that have made cyclospora the internet’s new main character and, say, the results of more standard food poisoning is that the explosive symptoms of cyclospora can last upward of a month if left untreated. Those symptoms can also seem to have disappeared, only to come back for Montezuma’s mesclun revenge. It’s a sneaky little parasite, and while it’s not uncommon for the United States to experience small upticks in cyclospora infections in the summer months—when warm and rainy weather creates a more festive environment for parasites to sow their wild oocysts—this summer’s outbreak has reached record-setting numbers in a handful of states and created an anxiety-inducing awareness of where our food is coming from, the amount it’s being regulated, and how little power we have in the matter. The matter being: trying not to get this dookie disease right now.
Cyclospora entered the pop culture canon over the past few weeks as a compulsively jokable scenario: We can’t eat vegetables, soda is medicine, poop is funny—an 8-year-old must have paid an Etsy witch to fuck shit up this summer! But the developing public health story—and our collective desire to avoid getting near-constant diarrhea—has made the whole thing a little more complex. What started for me as a simple desire to understand the correlation between my compulsive need for a biweekly fibrous salad and my extreme preference to never blow up a public bathroom has pushed me to learn more and more about single-cell parasites, the current state of the CDC and FDA, and why it feels like this random billionaire farm company is suddenly gaslighting me. But I’m not obsessive—I just have diarrhea. Or I could. And you could, too. So in an effort to figure all this out, here are some explosive answers to the most frequently asked questions about the cyclospora scandal:
OK, so how bad is this cyclospora outbreak on a scale of “pre-2016 before times” to “there was this global pandemic, and I’m different now”?
Since 2016, the CDC has reported, on average, around 2,800 cyclospora cases annually. Then came 2026, when the CDC has confirmed 4,173 cases and is aware of 7,400 additional state-reported cases since May 1 alone. This is a huge spike, and the worst U.S. outbreak of the parasite on record. So if you’re the kind of person who frequently gets sprayed by puddles on the sidewalk or bungles your cellphone straight into a bowl of soup, you may be thinking: OK, I would definitely be one of the 4,173 people to get the pooping parasite. In that case, maybe just avoid eating lettuce or knobby berries for the remainder of the summer. Yet fewer than 12,000 people have had symptoms so bad that they've reported them to a medical professional—there’s always the option that there are people infected with cyclospora who are just pooping their way through more minor cases—which we can objectively say isn’t so many people. Cyclospora: She’s no COVID-19. Mostly because she isn’t spread person-to-person, just poop-to-produce, and she hasn’t led to any reported fatalities. So explosive diarrhea summer does have that going for it.
So then why has the last week made it feel like we’re entering into the dookiedemic?
Novelty and branding. It seems like, for most of my life, I’ve been told every few months that some batch of romaine lettuce is positively riddled with E. coli. Yet still I rise, to the counter of every random airport bar I've ever visited to order a chicken Caesar salad with a crisp sauvignon blanc and very little discretion. But there’s a new parasite in town now (E. coli is a bacteria, which is different, but they both have the same end: diarrhea guts), and I’m honestly kind of relieved that romaine gets to share the bad-foodborne-illness rap with its much dodgier cousin, iceberg. There’s no science to this, but it just makes sense—like cyclospora’s PR team knows that bad press is better than no press, so let’s capitalize on the attention of being a “lesser-known diarrheal illness” by creating a mutually destructive PR relationship with the bad boy of lettuces. To be clear, cyclospora could potentially be lurking in any raw produce, but outside of lettuces, it’s most common in herbs and knobby fruits.
So this actually isn’t very scary?
Oh no, it’s actually very scary, extremely haunting stuff. Less because everyone you know has endless diarrhea and you’re going to get it, too—they probably don’t; you probably won’t—and more because the number of people who have diarrhea in this country is rapidly multiplying. And it’s due to a parasite in our food that has previously been kept at bay with regulated standards and practices that have recently experienced drastic changes. In 2025, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced mass layoffs in his department, cutting at least 6,000 workers between the FDA and CDC. Specifically for our diarrheal purposes today, the CDC laboratory that specializes in cyclospora went from 11 people to three. And in 2025, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network quietly reduced its mandatory federal surveillance from eight foodborne pathogens—including cyclospora, which individual states can now track voluntarily—to just two big hitters: salmonella and E. coli. Which seems like a really great way for cyclospora to go from iceberg ingenue to E. coli–level it girl. Other potential future pathogenic it girls include campylobacter, listeria, shigella, vibrio, and Yersinia—which were also downgraded to optional surveilling last year. (And not for nothing, monitoring and awareness programs around the flu, measles, screwworm, and Ebola have seen funding cuts as well!)
Daniel Jernigan, one of the three top officials who quit the CDC last year due to RFK’s policies, told The Washington Post last week that removing mandatory federal tracking of cyclospora doesn’t necessarily affect the current investigation of the outbreak, which still relies on state case reports. But he compared the infrastructural degradation to fighting fires: “Routine outbreak investigators are the firefighters responding to a specific blaze. FoodNet is the citywide system that tracks how often fires occur and whether the overall risk is rising. Removing cyclosporiasis from FoodNet … remove[s] part of the system that tells us how large the problem is and whether it is getting worse over time.”
All right, so while I wait for things to maybe get way worse in the long run, what can I do right now to not contract explosive diarrhea?
This is annoying, but washing your produce in cold water for at least a minute helps. Rinsing doesn’t necessarily get rid of cyclospora, but it reduces its parasitic load—sorry—which could make it less likely to quickly overwhelm the digestive system. (If nothing else, the introduction of cyclospora into the zeitgeist has taught me that there are so many scientific ways to say "projectile diarrhea.”) However, the only surefire way to consume all the produce you want, from anywhere you want, and still avoid cyclospora is to heat said produce to at least 158 degrees Fahrenheit and kill that parasite dead. So if you’re prepared for a summer of grilled Caesar salads and fruit pies … well, actually, that sounds like a great summer.
So what's the problem? Why are you still talking about diarrhea if hardly anyone has it, and the main result is that we need to eat pie?
Well, if you do get the actual diarrhea disease, the main issue is that, with so much pooping, you could become very dehydrated and risk kidney damage and hospitalization. As with many illnesses, those risks are most dangerous for people whose health or access to medical attention is otherwise compromised. Cyclospora can be treated with a 10-day course of antibiotics, so your main task, should you get the squirts, is to decide fairly quickly, “Is this a normal amount of diarrhea for me personally—or does this seem like a parasitic amount of diarrhea?” In which case, it’s worth knowing …
Where is cyclospora coming from, specifically?
Part of cyclospora’s cultural rise is connected to how mysterious its infectious rise has been. The first large cluster of reported cyclospora illnesses this year happened in late June, and it took investigators until last week to trace one outbreak of at least 1,644 confirmed cases back to shredded iceberg lettuce consumed in Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky. Cyclospora is particularly tricky to trace back to its contamination point because it can incubate inside you for up to 14 days before you begin showing symptoms—like a fucked-up familiar following you around and then turning on you, all because you dared to have a wedge salad on the Fourth of July??? Anyway, making matters even more difficult for investigators is the fact that most people might struggle to recall what they ate one or two weeks ago. With all those factors involved, it’s actually kind of incredible that health officials could trace this cyclospora outbreak back with the degree of specificity they have …
To iceberg lettuce, right? That’s what I should avoid?
Well, yes …
Is there a more specific origin point of the largest cyclospora outbreak on record that could help me know whether something I ate 10 days ago is about to give me explosive diarrhea?!
FINE, IT’S TACO BELL!!!!! More than 90 percent of the FDA’s trace-back interviews with infected patients mentioned Taco Bell. Specifically, the shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bells in Michigan and surrounding states. But there was just something about this early reporting that felt like grabbing at low-hanging fruit—unnecessarily punishing Taco Bell as an institution. An institution that’s been giving people diarrhea the normal way—the live más way—since way before the parasite lettuce ever got delivered to their doorstep. Taco Bell, to its credit, voluntarily removed all of its potentially affected produce from its supply chain before the FDA and CDC announced their full investigative findings. I mean, sure, the Taco Bell Innovation Kitchen does body horror for food menus, like if you gave Jigsaw from Saw unlimited access to a meat hose … but in this instance, Taco Bell did what it could. The company publicly issued a recall, adjusted its menu, and didn’t get pissy about being blamed for its food giving people diarrhea—because its food gave people diarrhea!!!
Hey, Jodi, are you OK? It feels like you’re taking this whole parasitic outbreak thing kind of personally?
Well, I am, because Taco Bell isn’t the only culprit here, even though it got an outsized amount of the blame. Taylor Farms also gave people cyclospora-induced diarrhea, and Taylor Farms is everywhere. For example, guess what was in my list of previously ordered groceries when I went to place a pickup order last night and is still there today, as an available option for me to purchase right here in New York City: a bag of shredded iceberg lettuce, fresh from Taylor Farms. This is personal. I could get the diarrhea disease! And so could a lot of other unsuspecting people. Because when the FDA did finally make its own statement about the trace-back investigation on July 16, it warned the public about consuming iceberg lettuce at Taco Bells in five states—but strangely, it didn’t name the “single supplier of iceberg lettuce from Mexico used by Taco Bell,” a vendor that just so happens to supply a lot of other food providers as well.
That entity was soon discovered to be Taylor Farms, one of the largest suppliers of fresh produce in the United States, when it quietly initiated a recall of iceberg lettuce on its website. Taylor Farms supplies $7 billion worth of produce to restaurants and grocery stores each year—yet we don’t totally know which restaurants and grocery stores because Taylor Farms isn’t required by the FDA to disclose which nationwide establishments sell and use its produce (we do know that list includes Safeway, Whole Foods, Target, and Walmart). Taylor Farms’ involvement in all of this was made even more confusing when the absolutely nutso recall notice on its website advised consumers to throw out any “recalled iceberg lettuce” by identifying said recalled lettuce only with internal abbreviations that consumers couldn’t possibly understand (like MKTSD for Walmart).
OK, so how do I avoid the secret lettuce in order to not get the lettuce diarrhea?
The FDA’s accompanying recall announcement identified 27 states in which Taylor Fresh Foods iceberg had been recalled, but reader: As someone whose state isn’t on that list, I still shan’t be eating it. As for the restaurants Taylor Farms supplies, you can only hope that the establishments you frequent are doing their due diligence by not serving you any potentially contaminated iceberg. The FDA’s announcement pinpointed the starting point of the contamination as “Taylor Farms de Mexico of Guanajuato, Mexico”—a Mexico-based outpost of the very much United States–based company—and said that some potentially affected products had sell-by dates as late as August 3. So how about we avoid Taylor Farms iceberg for the summer (at the very least)?
What exactly is the story with Taylor Farms in all this?
Well. According to The New York Times, Taylor Farms executives were at a White House meeting with FDA officials on the same day the FDA released its statement about Taco Bell and its unnamed mystery supplier. It’s worth noting that last year, Taylor Farms donated $1 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC. That was especially worth noting when, on Sunday, a few days after said White House meeting and some inscrutable recall notices, the FDA publicly updated its announcement to say that a cyclospora test of an iceberg sample from Taylor Farms de Mexico had registered a false positive. At which point, Taylor Farms sidled back up to that keyboard to imply in a statement that it hadn’t been positively identified as the source of the recall and said that the FDA had apologized for the false positive test.
I’m sorry, the FDA apologized to Taylor Farms?
Well, no, it didn't. Taylor Farms just made it up when it said, “Today, FDA apologized to us,” inexplicably choosing the British abdication of articles before certain nouns. I’m sure someone who Taylor Farms thought was very important apologized and said that it was actually a very good little giant corporation—but on Monday the FDA (finally) went on to make clear that informing Taylor Farms of the false positive was not a declaration that the FDA was walking back its investigation of Taylor Farms’ connection to the cyclospora outbreak. The false positive came from iceberg lettuce that hadn’t officially been recalled, so a true positive only would have proved that more produce needed to be recalled. Also, lab testing for cyclospora is notoriously tricky, and the FDA maintains that there was other “overwhelming epidemiological data” to support the Taylor Farms recall. Which means that if we follow the guidelines and operate with caution, liquid bowels summer could soon be calming back down to its regularly scheduled cyclospora numbers.
So if I want to use this information to be extremely cautious about not getting diarrhea from lettuce—but am open to getting diarrhea in more traditional ways—what should I be doing for the rest of the summer?
Well, Taco Bell just unveiled $1 lettuce-free enchiritos and nacho fries, which are so far from being associated with fresh produce that you couldn’t even get a second-degree fiber high if you wanted to. And if you’re enjoying produce that isn’t iceberg lettuce and isn’t from Taylor Farms (and brands publicly known to be supplied by Taylor Farms), you should still be able to avoid getting scurvy.
Salads may come and explosively go, but we’ll always have the memes. And hopefully not cyclospora.
