WASHINGTON, D.C. – The ruling class, with Donald Trump and RFK Jr. as their avatars, seemingly taking Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle as a blueprint, have decided to do away with an established concession to working people: clean food and drugs. As of early August 2026, almost twenty thousand people “may have” gotten sick from cyclosporiasis, a parasite that causes “frequent, watery and explosive diarrhea.” As of August 9, two people in Michigan are dead thus far.
Most of these cases can be attributed to an agribusiness conglomerate named “Taylor Farms,” also known as “Taylor Fresh,” one of North America’s largest producers of fresh produce. Taylor Farms, among many other things, supplies iceberg lettuce to Taco Bell, which the FDA claimed to be the “source” of the recent outbreak.
Taylor Farms has repeatedly thrown millions of dollars towards so-called “conservative political groups” and has donated hundreds of thousands towards anti-regulation super PACs as well. In January 2025, Taylor Farms dumped almost a million dollars into hiring lobbyists, lobbying against the FDA’s implementation of a Congressionally mandated “Food Traceability Rule,” which was set to take effect January 20th. Two months later, on March 20th, the FDA announced it was delaying the implementation by at least 30 months. Six days later, on March 26th, Taylor Farms donated one million dollars to a Trump-affiliated PAC known as “MAGA Inc.”
By July 2026, two months after the first reported cases, Taylor Farms was begging the White House to delay publicly announcing a recall, while public communication from both the FDA and Taylor Farms remained contradictory and difficult to follow. Taco Bell, for its part, despite also being previously involved in numerous outbreaks, including salmonella, E. coli, and Hepatitis A, announced a recall of all its Taylor Farms lettuce before the FDA or Taylor Farms themselves bothered to do so.
All of this, of course, comes as no surprise. Taylor Farms has been involved in numerous outbreaks, including a cyclosporiasis outbreak affecting over 600 people in 2013, an E. coli outbreak in 2015, another “small” cyclosporiasis outbreak in Colorado in 2023, and a second E. coli outbreak in 2024 that killed at least one person while sickening hundreds of others. Given this history, and the continued deregulation under the second Trump regime, the current outbreak is no freak accident; it is simply the worsening of an established pattern.
In 2025 and 2026, the Trump regime and Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” fired an estimated hundreds of thousands of employees from the United States federal government in the name of “cutting wasteful government spending.” Those fired include at least 20,500 workers from the HHS, 3,500 from the FDA, and 2,400 from the CDC. These agencies, already chronically underfunded and overburdened before the cuts, are now also run by RFK Jr., an insane, reactionary, anti-health lunatic who was photographed partying with Jeffrey Epstein and is also known for drinking raw milk and for claiming that Tylenol causes autism. Needless to say, these agencies have been defanged of any serious regulatory capacity. As if these efforts to starve the agencies of resources weren’t enough, Cyclospora reporting was made “optional” in 2025, after 28 years of being mandatory, along with five other pathogens tracked by the CDC’s FoodNet program.
The situation captures both the chaos and a core truth of capitalism: as various unscrupulous and craven factions of the ruling class ally with each other to increase profits by cutting regulatory corners, they also bicker, fight, and stab each other in the back, all to safeguard their own reputation and to make gains for themselves and their shareholders, at whatever cost. They are not the ones buying produce at the average grocery store; they pay a premium for ultra-organic, farm-sourced lettuce or dine at upscale restaurants, insulated from contamination while working people bear the risk of their decisions.
Meanwhile, the farmworkers who pick the food the rest of us eat, often undocumented people with no better options or, increasingly, prisoners performing slave labor amid the explosion in ICE kidnappings, are routinely denied access to clean water, toilets, the ability to wash their hands, sick leave, and other basic necessities to be expected when handling fresh produce.
There is no end in sight for these outbreaks. Things will continue to get worse while capitalists continue to hold the reins of power, until slightly smarter capitalists come along to regulate these industries just enough to stop sickening quite so many people, after which the cycle will repeat. The only real, lasting solution to this endless regulatory see-sawing is the complete expropriation of these monopolies, and indeed all production, to a truly democratic, worker-run state, a dictatorship of the proletariat, under socialism. Anything less, and the social murder will continue.
