Taylor Farms reached out to the White House before the government publicly linked the company to a cyclospora outbreak recall, and the move set off a behind-the-scenes call that one former FDA chief called unusual. Scott Gottlieb said Taylor Farms asking the White House to intervene was not standard operating procedure, and that he had never seen that kind of outreach when he was at the Food and Drug Administration.
That is why the Cyclospora Outbreak Taylor Farms Recall is drawing fresh attention now. The company was trying to slow a public announcement tied to a multi-state outbreak, and the White House asked FDA officials to join the call. For readers trying to understand why the episode matters, it is the collision of food-safety urgency and a company’s effort to buy time before its name was attached to the problem.
Gottlieb, speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, said, “It was not standard operating procedure,” and added, “And it wasn’t standard operating procedure when I was at FDA.” He said, “So it’s unusual.” That matters because Taylor Farms was not just objecting after the fact. It was arguing on the call that federal investigators did not have positive laboratory evidence tying its products to the outbreak and that the government was overstating its responsibility.
The dispute grew out of an investigation that first pointed to iceberg lettuce from a single supplier, Taylor Farms de Mexico, which issued a voluntary recall. Federal health officials then spent weeks issuing shifting messages. Last week, the FDA said lettuce not included in the recall had tested positive for cyclospora. A day later, it deleted that line and said the test was a false positive, while still saying the recall remained in effect.
Taylor Farms later posted a statement saying, “Today, FDA apologized to us,” even though there was no public information showing an apology had been made. The company also said, “at this moment, FDA has not identified a single positive product test result for Cyclospora.” It later clarified that the recall was still in effect and said it was no longer sourcing iceberg lettuce from central Mexico for that growing season.
The larger problem is that the public is left with a recall tied to a cyclospora outbreak that has sickened thousands, but without a clear public account of the exact evidence that led the FDA to prepare the warning in the first place. Until that is explained, the recall will remain not just a food-safety case, but a test of how quickly federal officials should speak when the evidence is still moving.
