Amid Cyclospora Outbreak Tied to Lettuce, America Skips Salads

Sara Tercero loves salads.

She goes through two plastic containers of salad — mostly kale — each week. A food influencer, she posts her favorite salad recipes on her website. She plans to release a cookbook next year, titled “Salad Queen.”

But as the number of cyclospora infections tied to lettuce has soared to a record high, Ms. Tercero has broken up with all leafy greens.

“I went grocery shopping yesterday and stared at all of the lettuce in the clam packages. None of it was touched,” Ms. Tercero said. “I’m avoiding buying all of it in the grocery store right now.”

Federal health officials have confirmed more than 4,100 cases of cyclosporiasis across 41 states, with many people becoming ill with stomach cramps and severe diarrhea. Authorities said they had linked some of the cases to iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico and served at some Taco Bell locations. That led Taylor Farms, the country’s largest produce supplier, to voluntarily recall lettuce shipped to 27 states.

None of that has calmed the country, which is in the grip of the Great Lettuce Scare.

The illnesses and uncertainty have caused many consumers to leave containers of raw spinach, arugula and romaine on many grocery store shelves and to steer clear of leafy greens in restaurants.

“Our lettuce sales are probably off about 10 or 11 percent,” said Stew Leonard Jr., the president and chief executive of Stew Leonard’s, a grocer with locations in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. He said the family-owned chain did not get any lettuce from Taylor Farms, adding that all of its lettuce comes from Canada and California.

“We definitely can see there is a percentage of customers out there saying, ‘I’m not going to buy any lettuce right now, period,’” he said. “They are listening to the news, and, for them, lettuce is practically radioactive.”

Visits to salad-centric restaurant chains like Sweetgreen, Chopt, Chipotle, Cava and Panera Bread all slumped last week, according to Placer.ai, which tracks foot traffic at retailers and restaurants. Since mid-July, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began issuing notices of a growing outbreak of cyclosporiasis, shares of Sweetgreen, Chipotle and Cava have tumbled by as much as 24 percent.

Sweetgreen, Cava and Panera Bread did not respond to requests for comment.

Taco Bell, which was the first chain to publicly state that it had removed lettuce and some other ingredients from restaurants in Michigan this month, has been pummeled the most. Visits to its restaurants plunged nearly 31 percent on July 17 compared to the day of week average this year through July 6, according to Placer.ai. The stock of its parent company, Yum Brands, has fallen 9 percent since mid-July

Trying to encourage its customers to return, Taco Bell posted on social media this week that it had removed all Taylor Farms lettuce from its restaurants. In a LinkedIn post, the chain’s chief executive, Sean Tresvant, added that Taco Bell would “continue to be transparent about what we know and what we are doing next.”

Other restaurant chains are also trying to reassure consumers that their lettuce is safe.

“Shredded iceberg lettuce is not served in Chipotle restaurants,” the company said in an emailed statement. “Our romaine lettuce and Supergreens salad mix are not sourced from Mexico, and at this time, we don’t believe our ingredients are associated with this outbreak.”

Similarly, Chopt said it did not serve iceberg lettuce in its restaurants. “We do not buy pre-shredded or prepackaged lettuce. We hand prep and cut,” the company said in an emailed statement. “The lettuce we do serve is sourced in the U.S., not Mexico.” By Tuesday, parts of that message were running on the company’s website.

But public trust in the food system has been walloped by the cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Some of that skepticism was fueled by a recall notice of some lettuce products late last week by Taylor Farms in 27 states. The notice did not include the full names of the grocery retailers or food distributors that shipped the lettuce to restaurants all over the country. Instead, it used codes like SY, MKTSD and SUB, leaving consumers to play an unwanted game of find-the-contaminated-lettuce.

“What are these codes? What is going on? Why is this so incoherent?” Thomas Gremillion, the director of food policy at the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America, said of the recall notice.

Under current Food and Drug Administration guidelines, producers are not required to publicly name distributors of recalled products.

After the F.D.A. announced on Saturday that a sample of iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico had tested positive for cyclospora during “targeted import surveillance,” it walked that test back the next day, concluding that the result was a false positive.

The “F.D.A. apologized to us,” Taylor Farms wrote on a social media post, adding the “F.D.A. has not identified a single positive product test result for Cyclospora.” The agency later denied having apologized to Taylor Farms.

“So did that test mean that Taylor Farms is fine?” Mr. Leonard asked, noting that he is telling customers to stick to leafy greens grown in greenhouses.

No, said the F.D.A. in its own social media post. “To clarify, this false-positive lab sample DOES NOT change the basis for F.D.A.’s ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms,” the agency wrote.

Dueling messages from top regulators in Mexico and the United States created more chaos. While Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insisted that the cyclosporiasis outbreak was “under control” and that the source of the outbreak has been identified, Mexico’s health secretary, David Kershenobich, said there was no evidence that the outbreak had originated in that country.

Wary of the mixed messages and flip-flopping, some smaller restaurant owners aren’t taking any chances.

Last week, Lee’s Crossroads Cafe in Arapahoe, Neb., pulled the lettuce from the salad bar.

“What I was hearing from customers was pure terror,” said Eric Lee, the owner of the cafe in the rural community in southern Nebraska of around 1,000 people. “I serve a very vulnerable, elderly, autoimmune-compromised population.”

Last week, Jalil Burbara Handal, the owner of Jalibaba Mediterranean Cuisine and Bakery, a food truck in West Jefferson, N.C., pulled salad from the menu and threw out about $60 worth of leafy greens he had received from his supplier.

“I am doing cooked vegetables in the bowls, instead of lettuce,” he said. This week, he posted on social media that mixed greens were back after he was able to source from a local farm that uses hydroponics and aquaponics to grow its produce.

This week, Ms. Tercero, the food influencer, posted a salad featuring cooked beets, lentils and radishes to her website, betterfoodguru.com. “Obviously, some people are going to be freaked out about the radishes,” she said. “They can leave that out.”

She’s now on the hunt for more leafy greens from local farmers’ markets, unwilling for now to buy any lettuce from the grocery store.

“I don’t know where all of the lettuce is coming from. They could be coming from the same processor using the same equipment, or maybe it’s coming from fields that are close to one another,” Ms. Tercero said. “And then there’s the flip-flopping. It’s not this, it’s that. The whole situation is not great for trust.”

As for eating out at restaurants, Ms. Tercero said, she is changing what she eats.

“I went out to dinner with my mother to a restaurant where my normal go-to order would have been a salad with a veggie patty on top,” Ms. Tercero said. “Instead, I ate some french fries.”