Most of the nation may want nothing to do with Taylor Farms and its shredded iceberg lettuce, which was recalled in dozens of states for potentially being contaminated with a parasite that turns your bowels into a garden hose.
Not so for the Amazon-owned Whole Foods, which is either hoping to capitalize on the controversy or proceeding as if nothing happened.
Over the weekend, we noticed that one of the grocery retailer’s locations in New York City was selling Taylor Farms’ shredded iceberg at a steep 50 percent discount — which, from an optics point of view, is absolutely extraordinary.
Is this an indictment of our country’s ruthless opportunism, and by extension, capitalism at large? Is it a total nonstory? If you’re unlucky enough, you’ll have plenty of time to ponder those questions on the porcelain throne. Many on social media just seemed to think it was a mix of funny and appalling.
“The cost is on the back end,” someone joked. “Discount diarrhea,” chimed another. Others were outraged that the location was still selling the stuff.
“They’re seriously not pulling that off the shelf,” one fumed. “For SHAME.”
The Food and Drug Administration narrowed the culprit down to a Taylor Farms facility in Mexico. So far, Taylor Farms has voluntarily recalled its Mexico products containing shredded iceberg lettuce from 27 states, including Michigan — the epicenter of the outbreak, where over 6,100 people are believed to be infected — Florida, Texas, and North Carolina.
New York state is not currently one of them, so Whole Foods isn’t obligated to pull the products from its shelves (or at least as obligated as is possible under what is technically a voluntary recall). Still, the recall has been expanded at least once already, so it’s not impossible that it could include more states in the near future. A Whole Foods representative declined to go on record, but insisted that the bag of lettuce in question was sourced from the USA, not Mexico, adding that the chain doesn’t carry any of the recalled products.
Tracing the provenance of food products can be pretty byzantine. It’s not clear at this point if Taylor Farms supplied lettuce to companies in states affected by the recall who then distributed that lettuce again more widely, the New York Times noted. Not even the FDA has “distribution information or a list of customers who received” the recalled product since Taylor Farms hasn’t provided it, it said on its website — something it’s not legally required to do.
It’s even more confusing to the public. Taylor Farms doesn’t share which stores and restaurants it directly supplied its products too, so consumers have to do their own detective work, or rely on those locations voluntarily declaring that they used those products.
All that’s to say that there’s a lot of uncertainty over what lettuce is safe and what isn’t. The safest thing to do in this environment, probably, is to just abstain from shredded lettuce entirely. But you have to admit, isn’t that Whole Foods 50 percent discount tempting? Maybe if you’re used to paying outrageous prices for a bag of mushy leaves.
More on the outbreak: Taylor Farms Made Huge Donation to Trump Group After Loosening of Rules That Could Have Prevented Explosive Diarrhea Outbreak