Lettuce isn’t the only shitty thing about Taylor Farms

The United States was built on slavery. It took us a full two hundred years to decide owning people might not be okay, and a further hundred years to codify some of that “all men are created equal” part of the Declaration of Independence into law. (We’re currently actively dismantling that last part, though.)

Slavery is so inherent to the US that, despite being abolished in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment, we snuck a little forced labor into the middle of it. As a treat.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.

Today, both state-owned industries (like the DMV) and private companies can hire (“hire”) prisoners. And they get tax credits for doing so. Prison labor produces goods and services worth in excess of $11 billion a year while the inmates are paid somewhere between literally nothing and pennies per hour. And, fun fact, prison labor is exempt from OSHA, so there’s no required training or safety regulations.

Inmates are forced into jobs ranging from manufacturing body armor to producing furniture to firefighting to farming. The prisoners rented out to both state-owned and private companies have been convicted of crimes ranging from drug crimes to, more recently, undocumented migrants detained by ICE.

Four years ago, reporting by The Arizona Republic found that several companies employing prison labor happened to be employing ICE detainees. People it'd be illegal to employ if not for the fact that they were prisoners and, therefore, already exempt and dehumanized.

One of those companies was Taylor Farms, the largest supplier of salads in the world. Back then, Taylor Farms was paying $4.75 an hour to the Arizona Department of Correction, Rehabilitation and Reentry. The DCRR, in turn, would pay the inmates $1.50 per day.

It’s unclear if Taylor Farms still uses the forced labor of inmates, and it’s worth noting that the current Cyclospora outbreak has been traced to farms in central Mexico, not the US — which is a whole other set of human rights issues.

But the point is kind of moot, really, because Taylor Farms has never exactly been a wholesome company.

Back in 2016, Taylor Farms employees protested at several Chipotle locations in California to expose workers experiences of “poverty wages, disrespect, and severe violations of their most basic rights.” Taylor Farms, by the way, provides Chipotle with their vegetables. They also supply or sell to — deep breath — Aldi, Amazon, Burger King, Costco, Denny's, Dollar General, IHOP, KFC, Kroger, McDonald's, Olive Garden, Pizza Hut, Sam's Club, Subway, Sysco, Taco Bell, Target, Walmart, Wendy's, and Whole Foods. And probably others.

Taylor Farms has issued food recalls in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2024 — sometimes multiple recalls per year — usually for E. coli or Listeria. Which, to be fair, are pretty standard food-borne illnesses. That phrase — “pretty standard food-borne illnesses” is also why the Food and Drug Administration introduced the Food Traceability Rule. That rule laid out “requirements [that] will allow for faster identification and removal of potentially contaminated food from the market, resulting in fewer foodborne illnesses and deaths.”

Those new rules were set to go into effect in January of 2026. In January of 2025, though, Taylor Farms hired a lobbying firm and spent a little under $1 million on political lobbying. It's a pretty safe bet they were arguing against the increased regulation. It’s also a safe bet that a lot of other companies were paying to fight the rules, but, again, Taylor Farms is the biggest supplier of salads in the US and in the world.

In a shocking coincidence, two months later, on March 20, 2025, the FDA decided to push back the implementation of the new rules by almost three years. Then, on March 26, Taylor Farms donated $1 million to the Make America Great Again, Inc. PAC — a wildly profitable political action committee for Donald Trump that the New York Times describes as a pay-for-access operation.

The timing means you can’t really call it a bribe. It’s more of a thank you gift.

And this is where Elon Musk gets involved.

Musk’s DOGE and the second Trump administration’s cuts to government programs like USAID meant that the group of scientists who watch for things like a Cyclospora outbreak lost over $30 million in funding and went from a team of 11 to just three. The head of the department resigned in protest.

Now, just over one year later, we've got the Cyclospora outbreak causing explosive diarrhea across the US (but mostly in the Great Lakes region). The CDC reports almost 11,000 confirmed cases with an additional 12,000 unconfirmed. Just this week, there have been two deaths associated with the outbreak.

The CDC’s response was delayed by the cuts to their funding, but the entire process was muddied by bad communication, corporate malpractice, and a little more (and more than a little) corruption.

Around July 22, 2026, the CDC had officially traced the outbreak to Taylor Farms lettuce from central Mexico sold to Taco Bells in the Midwest. Taylor Farms was given a deadline of noon on July 23 to issue a recall — thus alerting the public.

They didn’t.

And then the White House — remember that $1 million donation? — got the FDA and CDC together in a meeting. The resulting statement drafted as a result of that meeting named Taco Bell as the source of the outbreak, but explicitly did not name Taylor Farms as their supplier. The government’s statements finally went out after 10pm — 10 hours after the initial deadline.

On Friday, Taylor Farms issued their own statement, saying they were doing a voluntary recall and that, “according to the FDA, there are no confirmed positive sample results for product testing for Cyclospora as of August 5, 2026.” Which is technically true, since food-borne illness means you literally eat the evidence. But the CDC was, in fact, pretty sure about the source.

On Saturday, July 25, the CDC thought they’d found Cyclospora on a new batch of Taylor Farms lettuce. This was, to be clear, in addition to the source of the original outbreak. That result turned out to be a false positive — it’s a thing that happens and the CDC owned up to it.

Taylor Farms jumped on that, though, and announced, “We were informed that FDA made a mistake, and this was a false positive. To be clear, at this moment, FDA has not identified a single positive product test result for Cyclospora.” Then the FDA had to get on fucking Twitter to clarify what was going on because we live in a remarkably stupid future.

Again, it's technically true that the CDC has not tested any Taylor Farms product and found Cyclospora. But that is extremely misleading because the source of the outbreak is almost certainly lettuce provided by Taylor Farms. Taylor Farms is just tweaking the truth of the situation (also known as lying) for better PR.

Because it's not enough to be the largest salad company in the world. There is always more money to be made. Taylor Farms couldn't possibly risk the hit to their profits that would come from bad PR. A devastating hit that would leave them ... still the largest salad company in the world.

So why am I writing about food regulations on our video game website? Because it’s all the same story.

The president’s son-in-law is behind the sale of EA for a record-breaking amount of money. Ubisoft canceled games and gutted studios in the name of profits. Paying the Trump administration means you can violate anti-trust regulations. Microsoft can cut thousands of jobs to make up for obscene spending on AI nonsense. Sony and Rockstar can both decide to stop making physical discs to squeeze out a few extra bucks out of your hobby. FIFA tried to sell the World Cup for $20 billion. Taylor Farms can use slave labor, bribe the government, and lie about a deadly food-borne illness outbreak they caused.

Billionaires and corporations will forever find new and exciting ways to push the envelope of exploitation.

They’re making billions from your job that they can take away on a whim, your free time that they keep finding new ways to charge you for, and your annoying need to have food that may or may not kill you.

And it’s never the companies or the billionaires making the disastrous and deadly decisions that pay the price. Hell, bigger corporations can get away with just shifting the blame to smaller ones — Taco Bell has taken more heat in the Cyclospora outbreak than Taylor Farms has, even though they didn't have anything to do with it.

It’s all the same story. It’s all the same, singular fight.

And it is existential.