With ground beef at nearly $7 a pound, diarrhea lettuce, cattle screwworm, drought and heat, what's next for America's food supply?

**Christy Strawser** (0:01)
The day's biggest stories, the people behind the headlines, the conversations you won't hear anywhere else. I'm Christy Strawser. You're listening to Audacy's On Deadline. We're going to talk about the natural world, where most of the news is bad, and then move on to the unnatural world, Spider Man, where the outlook improves.
Let's begin with the latest on lettuce.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
I feel bold and adventurous if I eat a salad these days. This whole deal with the concerns about food safety and lettuce concerns, Taco Bell, explosive diarrhea, there's so much going on right now that we have to sort through. And you know what? This is something I never thought I'd talk to with Elizabeth Schultz, but here we go. She joins us now with ABC News. Elizabeth, I know you've been really, really covering this closely.
Should we be afraid to order a salad or eat a salad right now?

**Elizabeth Schultz** (0:53)
You know, I have been covering this more than I wish I could talk, you know, without saying those two words that you just said. When you think about the symptoms of the cyclosporitis outbreak, people are getting sick, you know, and the symptoms for this are really bad. You know, the severe stomach illness for weeks on end.
Right now, the guidance is that there, if you are going to eat lettuce, the states that have been linked to this multi-state outbreak of this parasitic stomach illness, there's nine states linked to it. Minnesota is not one of them right now yet, but it's shredded iceberg lettuce that was sourced by Taylor Farms from Central Mexico. So that's the lettuce that's been recalled voluntarily by the company, and that includes actually a Walmart brand lettuce that was on the store shelves. The issue being is that we're seeing that that lettuce was really distributed across the country and, you know, to vendors like Cisco that provide foods to schools and hospitals and all sorts of other events. And so that's making it, partially could explain why we're seeing cases go up across the country outside of those nine states officially linked by the FDA to this outbreak and possibly why we could see cases keep going up from here just because of the scale of this and how much is relied upon from that company and from this specific kind of iceberg lettuce too.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:09)
Well, that's what's so puzzling. So you talk to, let's say you go to a restaurant, they've got salad on the menu. I was talking to a server asking her, and she was going, they can only say so much. How do you even know you can wash it and do what you can? But how do we know? Is it the changes to how food safety is handled at the federal level and really sourcing these things that's causing the snowball effect of concerns about food safety?

**Elizabeth Schultz** (2:40)
Yeah, and it's a great point. And you feel for all those servers who are getting these questions right now, because we have been talking to food safety experts who say if you're going out to eat and you want to eat iceberg lettuce, ask the restaurant where the lettuce comes from. So, you know, restaurants are facing these questions all the time. You know, the outbreak specifically, by the way, was linked to Taco Bell. That's the only restaurant that's been cited. And they said they have removed all of that lettuce that if you go there and get a taco with shredded iceberg, it's not going to have this recall lettuce. There have been questions here at the federal level. And I actually put this question directly to the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., about are the cuts that we have seen to federal agencies like the FDA and the CDC.
Has that kind of slowed down the response to this outbreak in any way? He adamantly said no, that they have all the people they would typically have working on this. What we have seen is that there are fewer, there was basically a cut to a mandatory surveillance program for mandatory reporting of this specific parasite, cyclosporiasis, cyclospora is a parasite. There were cuts to the reporting of that last year, but there is still mandatory reporting from states to get kind of to the bottom of this. So they're saying any of the cuts that we saw over the past year have not affected how the response has been. What's notable is that we are also seeing other outbreaks right now. There's a salmonella outbreak across dozens of states, like two eggs. All of this is, there's kind of no question testing, at the very least, federal food investigators. And at the state level too, we're seeing states really have to take the lead in a lot of this. And some of these, especially the stomach illness, it's really hard to trace because the symptoms can take two weeks to show up. And a lot of people are not remembering what they ate two weeks ago, so that can make this even more complicated.