Taylor Farms Expands Lettuce Recall to 27 States Over Parasite Risk
Contaminated Lettuce and the Question Who Rules at the Dinner Table
When a company’s choices reach into our very bowels without our knowledge or assent, we are no longer talking of trade alone but of power — and power demands justification, not excuses after the fact.
That bags of shredded lettuce, grown in one country, processed in another, and served in restaurants across twenty‑seven states, should become the vehicle of a parasite causing what your physicians now call “explosive diarrhea,” is not only a story of sickness but of rule. For here a private company, Taylor Farms, by its common course of business, gained a power over the health of many thousands, perhaps more than can yet be counted. It chose a supplier in central Mexico, shipped products widely, and only when federal health officials linked that source to a cyclospora outbreak did it expand a voluntary recall and suspend distribution. The damage, it seems, had already begun.
When I wrote in the Second Treatise that men are by nature “free, equal, and independent,” I meant that no one is born subject to another’s will in his life, liberty, or estate without some act of consent. This equality is not undone when the relation is commercial rather than political. To eat is to live; whoever inserts himself between the earth and my mouth takes up, in that measure, a power over my life and health. Such power can be allowed, because division of labour greatly improves our condition, but it is held only on trust: that others will not, by negligence or secrecy, expose me to harms I never accepted.
The law of nature, which is but reason, commands that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Food made dangerous by contamination offends this rule, whether the injury is deliberate or through carelessness; the Maker of us all cares little, I suppose, whether disease entered my bowels by malice or by profit‑driven haste. The company here tells the public that it has stopped receiving product from the implicated lot, has suspended distribution of iceberg lettuce from central Mexico, and is working with federal and state authorities. These are necessary steps. They are not, by themselves, a discharge of the wrong already done.
Some will answer that Taylor Farms exercised no authority, but merely sold a thing which others freely chose to buy; the restaurants, like Taco Bell in several states, freely chose to serve it; and the consumers, warned in general terms that food sometimes carries risks, freely chose to eat. Yet this plea mistakes ignorance for consent. A man may choose to eat lettuce knowing, in the abstract, that nature is not perfectly safe; he does not choose to eat lettuce from a specific contaminated lot, linked by health officials to a multistate outbreak, when that fact is known to the producer but not to him. Consent without knowledge of the particular danger is no consent, but a trick played upon trust.
In politics I have distinguished ordinary rule by settled laws from prerogative, which is a power to act for the public good without a clear rule, or even against it, but only so long as the people plainly see their benefit and may withdraw their trust. Taylor Farms’ voluntary recall has something of this character. There was, before the outbreak, some standing law governing food safety, but here the company, on its own judgment, expanded a recall to twenty‑seven states, listed twenty‑five products under eight brand codes, and cut off its Mexican source. This discretion is commendable only if it is both effective and subject to public oversight; otherwise it is but the fox announcing, of his own grace, that he will eat fewer hens.
The deeper matter is that corporate discretion of this sort approaches arbitrary power when there is no clear rule known beforehand, no independent inspection sufficient to prevent such outbreaks, and no impartial judge accessible to the injured without undue burden. In the state of nature every man is judge in his own case; the great advantage of civil society is to place an indifferent judge between us. But if the same hands that buy from distant fields, process the food, profit from distribution, and draft the recall language also largely decide what the public shall know and when, we are driven back, in effect, toward a state where the strong decide first and the weak must suffer and sue after.
As I argued when defining political power as a right to make laws with penalties only for the public good, any power that touches men’s property, in the broad sense of their lives, liberties, and estates, must show that it leaves them better secured than they would be without it. The supply of food by great enterprises can do this, but only if the legislative power of society lays down standing rules, backed by real inspection and real remedies, that prevent avoidable harm and make redress swift when harm occurs. If, after this outbreak, those rules remain obscure, enforcement patchy, and information chiefly in the control of those whose reputation is at stake, then the people are not bound to sit quiet under it. They may, and in conscience ought to, demand such reforms as turn this discretionary power into accountable trust.
I do not claim to know, from the few public reports now before us, every failure in this chain: whether the negligence lay in the fields of Mexico, the plants of California, or the halls of public authority. I know only that persons, being the workmanship of one Maker and not of Taylor Farms, may not have their health put at notable hazard without informed assent and robust protection. When power, under whatever modern name, reaches as intimately as into a man’s gut, and yet answers only weakly to his voice, it has already stretched the trust of mankind farther than it can bear.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The law of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.