How the produce team kept our lettuce out of the headlines
September 29, 2026
By Sam Mellins
Harry and Meghan’s self-exile, Taylor and Travis’s blockbuster wedding and a gastrointestinal disease linked to explosive diarrhea. Of these three things that swept the country this summer, guess which one people are still talking about?
Since May 1, New York City has seen more than 600 cases of cyclosporiasis, the gastrointestinal disease associated with lettuce imported from Mexican farms. As of early September, there were more than 17,000 reported cases and two deaths in the U.S., according to The New York Times. None of those cases were caused by produce from the Park Slope Food Coop, where staff has been taking special measures to ensure that members were not at risk from any of the produce on Coop shelves.
Coop members’ salad-spending behavior barely budged.
Those stricken with the illness experienced frequent and uncomfortable bowel movements, cramps, weight loss and fatigue, among other symptoms. The disease occurs to some degree every summer, but the outbreak this year led to more than twice as many cases in New York City as there were last year.
Despite the hundreds of cyclospora cases across New York City, Coop staff had several reasons to be confident that members were safe from the threat. First of all, the produce tied to cyclospora was imported from Mexico, and in the summer, the Coop mostly sources its produce from local farms, according to produce buyer Cecelia Rembert. “We don’t really get any leafy greens out of Mexico right now,” Rembert said.
Practicing an abundance of caution, Coop staff checked up on whether any items in stock or on order were from Taylor Farms, the Salinas, California company whose fields in Mexico were a primary source of the outbreak. The answer, it turned out, was no.
“There were only a couple of produce items that would even possibly have come from Taylor Farms, but we did verify that we definitely hadn’t been receiving any,” Rembert said.
Coop staff regularly checked in with suppliers to be sure that there were no reports of cyclospora in their products. “Our produce distributors were very mindful of this, because they don’t want it to come back on them,” Rembert said.
While Rembert and her team worked behind the scenes to ensure that the food the Coop sells was safe, members’ salad-spending behavior barely budged. “The news did not impact sales of lettuce at the Coop,” said Rembert. “Maybe the first week or two we had a drop in salad sales, but we were still ordering our same numbers. It didn’t affect our sales very much.”
The disease occurs to some degree every summer, but the outbreak this year led to more than twice as many cases in New York.
Coop member Alexis Nowicki was one of the members whose summer-salad life did not suffer. “There might have been one week where I was like, ‘Okay, I guess we aren’t supposed to be eating salad,’” she said. “But I think I’m generally pretty unafraid of this sort of thing.”
Enough shoppers shared Nowicki’s attitude that salad sales remained flat in July, during the height of the cyclospora wave, according to Rembert. On July 17, Taylor Farms, the fresh-produce juggernaut that supplies supermarkets and restaurants nationwide, recalled iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico as the FDA investigated links between lettuce and the outbreak.
“I always think of the Coop as a place I can trust to not have food that’s going to make me sick,” Nowicki said. “If something was bad, they wouldn’t put it on the shelves.”
Sam Mellins is senior reporter at New York Focus.