If Upton Sinclair were alive right now, he’d be shouting from the rooftops about the state of our food system.
The current wave of food recalls is a direct byproduct of President Donald Trump’s administration deliberately removing the safeguards put in place aimed at protecting American consumers more than a century ago. And that plan was put in place well before he was even elected to a second term.
As of August 27, the explosive diarrhea outbreak linked to the cyclospora parasite found in Taylor Farms’ shredded iceberg lettuce has led to two deaths, 495 hospitalizations and 11,495 cases across nearly two dozen states. According to the US Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG) this is the largest cyclospora outbreak ever and the third-largest foodborne illness outbreak in history. The last time the Taylor Farms facility responsible for the outbreak was actually inspected was in 2019.
But the cyclospora outbreak is just one of many such cases this summer in which meat and produce have been recalled. Jalapenos in 32 states were recalled after being linked to salmonella. Roughly 400 people got sick after eating the tainted jalapenos, which were sold at popular Mexican fast-casual restaurants like Chipotle and Qdoba. Frozen blueberries have been recalled in eight states and were given a Class I recall by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is its highest risk warning, over potential E. coli contamination.
More than 1.5 million eggs produced in Texas were recalled for salmonella contamination, and given a Class I designation by the FDA. 24,000 pounds of frozen buffalo chicken were also recalled in late August and given a Class I designation. The FDA has also issued recalls for mixed berries (E. coli), pistachio nut butter (salmonella), green powder supplements (salmonella), soup kits (listeria), granola (salmonella), both wet and dry dog food (salmonella), and even salad dressings (salmonella). And those recalls are just from August: 2026 has seen food recalls on everything from chocolate bars to baby formula, organic chia seeds, and pita chips linked to various foodborne illnesses including salmonella, E. coli, listeria, and even botulism.
While it’s important for the media to do the job of informing consumers about when food is unsafe to eat, most American media outlets are failing to connect the dots between the current wave of food safety recalls and policy decisions by the Trump administration that have directly led to Americans rolling the dice every time they go to the grocery store. The fact that so much of our food is unsafe now is simply the conservative ideology of deregulation in the service of ever-higher corporate profits finally coming home to roost.
Project 2025 Called for This Exact Scenario
The origin of these high-profile food safety recalls can be traced back to an April 2025 decision by the Trump administration’s FDA to effectively end most of its routine food safety inspections. The FDA’s plan is to eventually outsource most food safety inspections to state and local authorities, who have vastly less staffing and resources than the federal government.
In June of last year, centibillionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative hollowed out the FDA’s food inspection division by firing 20 percent of its staff. And 40 percent of the office responsible for inspecting “critical” foods like infant formula was also vacant last year. Musk even reduced the number of scientists working in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s office tracking food parasites (like cyclospora) from 11 to just 3.
This is all by design. In Project 2025, the far-right Heritage Foundation explicitly called for food safety inspections to be curtailed in the service of higher profits for the handful of billion-dollar corporations that control our food supply. The Trump administration is apparently viewing the massive 900-page playbook for an authoritarian regime as more of an instruction manual than a reference guide. To date, roughly 55 percent of Project 2025 has already been implemented.
On page 305 of the document, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Daren Bakst — who authored the section of Project 2025 pertaining to the US Department of Agriculture — lamented that “only meat and poultry from federally inspected facilities can be sold in interstate commerce.” He further complained that requiring states with USDA-approved inspection programs to meet and enforce requirements “at least equal to” those imposed under the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was an “unnecessary regulatory barrier that makes it difficult to get meat and poultry into interstate commerce.”
It’s worth noting that the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was passed as a direct response to the horrors of the meatpacking industry that Upton Sinclair wrote about in “The Jungle.” While Sinclair focused on the exploitation that underpaid and overworked immigrant workers faced in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, both everyday Americans and then-President Theodore Roosevelt were horrified by the book’s vivid descriptions of how rotten and disease-ridden meat was packaged and sold to consumers, leading to the passage of landmark food safety legislation just a few months after the book was published. Project 2025 is now forcing us to repeat the history we failed to learn from.
The Real Villain: Corrupt Agrobusiness Monopolies
As tempting as it is to blame the Trump administration, Elon Musk, DOGE, and Project 2025 for our current food safety crisis, the true culprits responsible for the poisoning of our food system are faceless executives in corporate boardrooms who have been at this for a long time.
WIRED reported in July that Taylor Farms — the company whose lettuce has already sickened over 11,000 Americans — donated more than $2,000,000 to conservative groups just last year alone. This includes $1 million to the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. super PAC, and another $1.1 million to various other super PACs that work to elect more Republicans to Congress. That all comes on top of another $1.6 million in donations to conservative PACs between 2020 and 2024. The company’s CEO and chairman, Bruce Taylor, is also a prominent donor to conservative causes, donating more than $900,000 to Republican politicians and groups since 2020.
One recipient of Taylor Farms’ largesse was AFP Action, which is an organization linked to the Koch network that explicitly lobbies for more deregulation in the agriculture industry. Since 2025, Taylor Farms has spent $810,000 on lobbying the federal government, hiring attorneys with the firm Sidley Austin who focus on “regulation of food safety.”
The current cyclospora outbreak could be traced directly back to Taylor Farms’ political donations. Six days before its $1,000,000 donation to MAGA Inc. in March of 2025, the Trump administration’s FDA announced that it would delay enforcement of the Food Traceability Rule by another 30 months to “allow industry additional time, across all regulated sectors, to fully implement the final rule’s requirements.” The rule’s implementation has been delayed time and again despite being part of a law Congress passed 15 years ago, and now won’t go into effect until July of 2028.
That rule was part of the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 (FSMA), which former President Barack Obama signed into law after it was passed by a Democratic Congress. The law gives the FDA more oversight and inspection authority to impose science-based controls across the entire food supply chain, with the goal of reducing foodborne illness.
The fact that the law passed at all was a significant victory, given that agribusiness monopolies unleashed a torrent of money aimed at lobbying Congress against new food safety regulations after then-First Lady Michelle Obama announced her campaign against childhood obesity. The Obama administration ultimately backed away from its goal of trying to stop corporations from marketing unhealthy food to kids.
In a late August essay, The Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel detailed how the processed food industry spent more than $1 billion on lobbying between 1998 and 2020. And the Union of Concerned Scientists found that in the four-year period between 2019 and 2023, Big Ag devoted over $500 million to lobbying. They targeted their efforts on the key authors of the Farm Bill to ensure that they were in charge of writing the rules that governed their industry.
The end result of this lobbying is a federal government that is woefully understaffed and ill-equipped to do the work of enforcing the FSMA. According to vanden Heuvel, the FDA has consistently failed to meet the FSMA’s food safety inspection benchmarks for the last eight years. Even though the FSMA calls for 19,200 foreign safety inspections each year, the FDA only conducted 995 in 2025, falling short of its goal by 95 percent.
This problem is compounded by the fact that Trump is now temporarily suspending tariffs to import approximately 300,000 metric tons of beef into the US over the next three months without telling us where it’s coming from. Trump argues the move is necessary to lower beef prices, but American cattle ranchers say the move will decimate an already weakened US beef industry with herds already depleted due to the ongoing screwworm outbreak. And it goes without saying that mystery meat whose country of origin is unknown could very well lead to future foodborne illnesses given the dire shortage of federal food inspectors.
The food industry’s aggressive lobbying has paid dividends in other ways: in July, three major egg producers — Cal-Maine Foods, Versova, and Hickman’s Egg Ranch — reached a settlement with the Department of Justice and 17 other states to get off with a slap on the wrist for illegally colluding to raise egg prices between June of 2022 and March of 2025. Those companies pocketed more than $1.22 billion in profit thanks to their price-fixing scheme, but under the terms of the settlement, they’ll only have to pay $3.3 million in fines to those 17 states and donate 53 million eggs to local food banks and pantries. This price-fixing scheme took place before the H5N1 bird flu outbreak of 2024, which gave large egg producers cover while Americans largely blamed the Biden administration for record-high egg prices.
The entire conservative rationale for deregulation is debunked when considering the unparalleled greed of agribusiness monopolies. Conservatives argue that when removing bureaucratic hurdles for big corporations, that allows those companies to cut costs, leading to consumers paying lower prices as a result.
But as we’ve seen over the years, corporations are happy to gouge us with soaring prices despite the current administration decimating regulations across the board. When they’re caught conspiring to keep prices high, they’re able to get out of it with a chump-change settlement amounting to peanuts while burying Congress in an avalanche of billions of dollars in lobbying so they can ensure they’re in charge of regulating themselves.
It isn’t enough to just vote out the lawmakers on the take, root out the current corrupt administration figures taking a lackadaisical approach to regulating big business, and staff up the FDA and CDC offices in charge of stopping foodborne illnesses so they can actually enforce the laws already on the books. The next Democratic Congress and White House has to make it a priority to drag these executives in front of committees to grill them over their cavalier attitude toward poisoning our food supply to fatten their own pockets. And it needs to prioritize getting big money out of politics so the needs of ordinary people will finally take precedence over a small handful of insatiably greedy billionaires who never seem to have enough despite already having it all.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
