What the 19 Million Egg Recall and Diarrhea Lettuce Outbreak Reveal About America’s Food System

Last week we exposed Big Pork.

This week…Meet Big Egg 🥚and Big Lettuce. 🥬

The recent nationwide Salmonella egg recall and multistate diarrhea lettuce outbreak may seem like unrelated events.

But they’re actually exposing the exact same problem.

The more we pull back the curtain on our modern food system, the more you realize the issue isn’t just the food.

It’s the way the centralized food system was designed!

🥚 Big Egg

The recent egg recall is a perfect example of how a highly controlled and centralized food system can create problems on an enormous scale.

Nearly 19 million eggs were recalled after being linked to a Salmonella outbreak. As of this week, 98 people across 17 states have become sick, and 26 have been hospitalized. (ref)

Stop and think about that for a second.

One company’s eggs, impacting 17 states, with a ‘batch’ of nineteen million eggs potentially contaminated with Salmonella.

I thought government inspections and washing eggs with harsh cleaning agents were supposed to prevent this?

😉

Chickens naturally deposit a microscopic protective coating on every freshly laid egg called the bloom (or cuticle). It’s an incredible piece of natural engineering, sealing many of the tiny pores in the shell, helping protect the egg from bacteria and slowing moisture loss.

Nature figured this out long before we did.

That’s why many countries simply leave the bloom intact! The eggs aren’t washed, and they are sold with their natural protective barrier exactly as the hen intended.

The modern US centralized food system chose a different path.

Eggs are washed, sanitized, graded, packaged, refrigerated, and shipped through one of the most centralized egg distribution systems in the world.

The stated goal is “food safety”.

But mandated egg washing also...

• - makes it possible to standardize and centralize egg production on an enormous scale,
• - allows for more government control (since farms need to be 'monitored')
• - and enables producers to hide the reality of unnatural factory farm conditions.

Instead of asking:

‘How do we wash eggs to make sure they are safe?’

Maybe instead we should be asking:

‘Why are we raising hens in factory-farm conditions where washing every egg became necessary in the first place?’

Nature designed eggs with a protective bloom.

We removed it.

Then we built an entire industry around replacing nature with chemicals, sanitation systems, refrigeration, and increasingly complex logistics.

And this model made today’s highly centralized egg industry possible.

Today, the five largest egg companies produce more than 32% of all eggs in America (up from about 24% in 2008).

Those same companies own roughly half of all laying hens in the United States.

And more than 85% of America’s table eggs come from massive integrated operations where eggs are laid, washed, graded, packaged and shipped from the same complex.

Just take a step back and think about that for a second.

If one of these massive companies has a problem, millions of eggs are recalled, grocery stores across multiple states are affected, and hundreds or thousands of people can become sick.

The problem isn’t simply one farm.

The problem is that we’ve designed a food system where enormous amounts of our food come from a relatively small number of massive, centralized, unnatural, factory-farm facilities. A system that relies on increasingly complex biosecurity measures, sanitation, drugs, and chemicals to keep production moving at such a massive scale. 

When production becomes this concentrated, a single failure ripples across the entire country.

🥬 Big Lettuce

And eggs aren’t the only example.

Now let’s talk about Big Lettuce. 

Because the recent Cyclospora outbreak pulled back the curtain on another part of our food system.

Here’s a fun trivia question for ya:

What do Whole Foods, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Taco Bell have in common?

It sounds like the setup to a joke.

But the answer is:

They’re often buying lettuce processed by the same company.

That company is Taylor Farms, one of North America’s largest fresh produce processors. It grows some produce itself, partners with hundreds of massive industrial-scale farms, then washes, cuts, packages, and distributes produce to grocery stores and restaurants across the country.

Taylor Farms reports harvesting more than 1.5 million pounds of lettuce every day.

That’s over half a billion pounds of lettuce per year. 

> Large farms grow the lettuce 

> Taylor Farms washes, cuts, packages and distributes it 

> Grocery stores and restaurants buy it 

> you eat it.

From the consumer’s perspective, it feels like we have countless choices: Whole Foods, McDonalds, Walmart, Taco Bell, and different stores.

But in many cases, we’re simply choosing different customers of the same produce processor.

Once again, what looks like dozens of different choices is often the same centralized supply chain wearing different logos.

Now let’s zoom out.

Because this isn’t really an article about eggs or lettuce.

It’s a reflection on the design of the modern American food system.

Because once you see the pattern, you start seeing it everywhere: pork, beef, chicken, eggs, lettuce, wheat, grains.

Over the past several decades, more and more of the food system has become centralized around a small number of massive factory farms, processors and distributors.  

And here are just a few of the consequences of this model: 

> Government 'health' agencies, Big Ag Companies, and large food processors gain more control 

> Farmers have fewer places to sell their food products to

> The system rewards producing more food, more uniformly, and at the lowest possible cost

And to be fair, many farmers are simply trying to survive within the system they’ve been given. They aren’t the enemy.

The incentives are!

And incentives shape outcomes.

When efficiency becomes the highest priority, food gradually loses the very things that once made it special: character, flavor, and nutrition.

A system that excels at producing enormous quantities of cheap food comes with real tradeoffs:

• - Less diversity and nutrients
• - Less flavor and character
• - Little to no transparency
• - Poor resilience

And by the time the food reaches your plate, there’s often little or no connection to the farmer, or the land where it was grown.

That’s the modern centralized American food system.

Here’s my view.

To me, this comes back to a food safety issue, and not just in the way people typically think about it.

I don’t think every large factory farm is unsafe.

And I do not believe every small farm is automatically safe.

I’m talking about the safety of being able to access food.

Because food centralization creates fragility.

When a large percentage of our food comes from just a handful of companies…

A single contamination can disrupt food supplies across the entire US.

That’s not resilience.

That’s concentration risk.

I think we’ve confused efficiency with food security.

For decades, we’ve optimized our food system to produce more food with fewer companies.

It certainly made food cheaper and more abundant.

But it also created a system where enormous amounts of our food depend on relatively few processors and distributors.

I believe the better design is actually an older one.

The old-fashioned farm cooperative.

Lots of independent farms, each producing exceptional food, and each remaining directly accountable for how that food is grown.

The small farms work together through shared standards and regional distribution to make it convenient for families to buy from many small farms instead of one giant one.

To me, decentralization is the real food safety.

Not just reducing bacteria on today’s food.

But building a food system that’s resilient, transparent, traceable, and decentralized. 

And designed to work with nature instead of constantly fighting against it.

These recent egg and lettuce outbreaks aren’t random accidents.

They’re exposing the architecture of the modern food system itself.

They also reminded me of why we started Nourish Food Club in the first place.

We opted out of this centralized model, and are building a different kind of food system.

One built around smaller regenerative farms instead of a handful of massive processors.

One where we know the farmers by name, how the animals were raised, how the crops were grown, and what’s in the feed.

Where food isn’t anonymous.

And where it hasn’t traveled through a maze of processors before reaching your family.

Does it require more coordination and time to work with more small farmers? Yes. 

Would it be easier to source everything from a few giant suppliers? Yes.

But convenience is exactly what built the food system we have today.

So instead, we’re reviving something much older.

A modern version of the old-fashioned farm cooperative.

Independent farmers, with shared Nourish Food Club standards, collectively producing high quality food with care, delivered directly to your door.

Because I don’t believe the future of food is bigger factories.

I believe it’s more small farmers, more transparency, more resilience, and a stronger connection between the people growing your food and the people eating it.

That’s the real food safety!

Thank you for helping us build it.

One small regenerative farm at a time.

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