Why Does the US Have so Many Recalls and Outbreaks This Summer?

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

In 2025, the administration cut thousands of jobs across federal health agencies and billions of dollars in grants to state and local health departments.

Those cuts landed on a public-health system that was already stretched. “Our public health systems have been chronically underfunded for a long time, and we’re seeing that worsen,” Firestone said.

In a statement, the FDA said that “frontline FDA investigators are critical to the FDA’s mission and were exempt from past workforce reductions.”

The agency said that while there are more foodborne illness clusters in 2026 than in previous years, it is “constantly working to improve laboratory detection of foodborne illness,” such as Cyclospora. “Still, Cyclospora remains a challenging agent and epidemiology, and traceback are key elements of an outbreak investigation.”

Food safety cuts predate the Trump administration. In 2012, under the Obama administration, the USDA’s Microbiological Data Program ended after its funding was eliminated. The program had sampled and tested selected fruits and vegetables for foodborne pathogens, reporting its findings to federal and state public health agencies — proactive surveillance, rather than waiting for reports of infections to crop up.

Some food-safety hazards, Hedberg said, are well understood and “just require constant attention on the part of producers to be able to prevent.”

So, should I be scared of my groceries?

Hedberg doesn’t think this summer should change the way Americans eat. “Most of the food moving through the system is free of contamination,” he said.

Fresh produce remains an important part of a healthy diet, and he cautioned against allowing a single enormous outbreak to distort our sense of risk.

That doesn’t mean accepting outbreaks as inevitable.

Thirty years ago, hamburgers kept Marler incredibly busy: more than 90% of his E. coli cases involved them. Today, he said, it’s practically zero. “That’s because of government intervention and industry stepping up.”

After the deadly 1993 Jack in the Box outbreak, regulators and the meat industry introduced new rules, testing, and other safeguards that made hamburger substantially safer.

So, is this summer unusually riskier? The Cyclospora outbreak is. Beyond that, many of the problems are familiar ones. And the hamburger example shows that which foods pose the biggest risks can change substantially over time.