Why So Many Food Recalls Lately? The Answer Is More Complicated Than You Think

There’s a certain tension in the air if you go into any big grocery store this summer. Not dramatic and not clear. It’s there, though. You might use your phone to check the FDA website between the produce section and the deli counter before putting something in your cart. Lettuce. Eggs and blueberries. Peppers. Salsas. The list is now long enough that the events on it no longer seem like a coincidence.

What is really going on? In short, it’s a lot of things at once, and not all of them are new.

The most obvious change is that public health officials are much better at finding contamination. In the last ten years, labs have started using whole-genome sequencing, which is a type of genetic fingerprinting that can connect illness cases from different states that don’t seem to be connected to a single bacterial source. It looks like a few stomach bugs in Kansas City and Tampa were part of the same outbreak, which can be traced back to a single processing plant in California. It was always possible to get infections. They are now linked. There is a chance that a big part of what seems like more food safety problems is actually more people being caught.

Still, detection by itself doesn’t explain everything. The way the modern food supply is set up also makes a difference. Only one contaminated ingredient, like jalapeños from one grower in Sinaloa, Mexico, can hurt more than one product. The food is sent all over the country to food service companies, restaurant chains, and wholesalers. After that, each product that used those jalapeños could then have its own recall. Suddenly, one root cause leads to dozens of recall notices, and the numbers look scary even though the problem at its core has been contained. To put it another way, recall counts can be wrong. They often lie about how many separate failures there are, making one failure look like a lot of others.

Global sourcing makes things even more complicated. People in the U.S. now expect fresh food all year, like iceberg lettuce in December and strawberries in January. That means that more and more of what Americans eat is grown abroad, where there are different rules about how to handle irrigation water and produce. There are different rules for inspecting farms in different parts of Mexico compared to California. The FDA does not have the resources to keep an eye on all of these links in real time.

There’s also something else going on that’s harder to talk about without getting into policy. In the past few years, federal and state public health agencies have lost a lot of money and staff. Systems that were already running low on money lose even more. Less inspectors. Less proactive testing. We will be watched less before something goes wrong. The FDA says that frontline investigators were safe, so it’s still not clear how much this has changed the current outbreak season. However, food safety researchers have been worried for a while about the damage to public health infrastructure. The ground was moving already.

It’s important to note that the cyclosporiasis outbreak in 2026 that was linked to lettuce is very unusual. Epidemiologists say that this is the first time that more than 13,000 illnesses have been linked to a single parasite in a single outbreak season. Fish and E. coli are easier to find and track down than Cyclospora. This is because the parasite can’t be grown in a lab like bacteria can. Because of this, genomic sequencing can’t do as much, and researchers have to rely more on talking to sick people and finding common food exposures. It takes longer and is more messy.

After reading about all of this in the news all summer, it seems like the food system is struggling under the weight of its own size. Not broken. Not incredibly dangerous. but with smaller profit margins than most customers think. Most of the food that goes through stores every day is fine. The statistical chance of getting really sick from shopping for groceries stays low. But the things that make it possible for one dirty farm to cause problems in 32 states in just a few weeks aren’t going to change.

Bill Marler is a food safety lawyer who has helped people get sick from food for 30 years. This summer, he put it simply: his office is busier than it has been in years. That’s not a good piece of information. But it’s a good one.