About the Cyclospora Parasite on Lettuce - Jermaine Fowler - 7/19/2026

The same lettuce that put 1,600 people on the toilet with explosive diarrhea is sold at Whole Foods for eight dollars and at Taco Bell for one.

This week investigators traced the outbreak to its source. Cyclospora, a parasite you cannot wash off, had ridden shredded iceberg through five states and into ninety-four hospital beds, and when they ran it backward through the sick it landed on a single field in Mexico. Reaching Taco Bell through a company called Taylor Farms, the lettuce also bags out at Walmart and Whole Foods and Target, and Taylor Farms clears about seven billion dollars a year doing it.

One farm feeds the drive-through and the organic aisle both. It has done this longer than anyone selling you the difference wants you to know.

Lettuce is one of the oldest things we grow. Egyptian tomb painters put it on the walls four and a half thousand years ago, tall and upright and sacred to Min, the god of fertility, who was thought to draw his stamina from its milky sap. The Romans named it for that sap, lactuca, from lac, for milk, and the word wore down over the centuries into the one we say without thinking. A leaf on a temple wall, grown once in a garden plot the size of a grave and washed in a bowl by hand.

Look at what the factory does to it now.

Above Salinas, a machine the size of a car crawls the rows and shaves the young greens off at the crown, a refrigerated trailer waiting to close a cold chain that will not open again until the produce case at your store. Untouched by a single hand, the leaves ride from field to plant to bag, cored and sluiced and spun and commingled, a thousand fields poured into one wash tank and stirred. Interchangeable now with ten million others, the leaf that fed a fertility god cannot be traced by anyone, not you and not the company, back to the field where it grew.

The bag says fresh. The bag says farm.

Inside is a warehouse product, cold and standardized and stripped of origin, wearing the last thing about it that still looks like a garden, which is the color green.

Cyclospora travels in human sewage, and where that sewage reaches a field’s irrigation lines it seeds the crop with something microscopic and patient. Left behind is an oocyst, a hard little capsule that clings to the leaf’s ribs and folds and waits, needing days of warm soil to ripen into the form that can hurt you. Chlorine cannot touch it. It survives the wash. That triple-washed bath the industry sells you as safety runs right over it, and worse, the communal bath is how one fouled field becomes five sick states, because the water meant to clean the leaves is the water that spreads the passenger from the tainted lot into all the clean ones swirling beside it.

Carrying no passport and no label, the parasite crossed one border and then thirty-four state lines, rode the dollar taco and the eight-dollar clamshell with the same ease, and stayed invisible until investigators worked backward through the wrecked guts of the people who ate it.

Everything true of the parasite is true of the company that shipped it.

In 1989 Fresh Express sold eighty million dollars of cut greens. By 2003 it sold a billion, and by 2006 bagged salad was better than one in twelve dollars spent on fresh produce in the whole country.

It took less than a quarter century to turn a chore people had done for themselves since Egypt, rinse a leaf and tear it, into an aisle. Upscale restaurants had served loose young greens under the French word mesclun, and the growers who supplied them, watching what a French word did to the price, took to calling the product yuppie chow among themselves, the industry's private name for the thing it sells you as virtue.

When Costco first ordered Earthbound's prewashed mix in 1993, it asked the growers to leave the word organic off the bag, because to Costco organic meant high price and low quality. So the growers sold Costco the organic lettuce and simply left the word off. Grown the same way, one leaf carried the word or shed it depending only on who was standing at the register.

Dressed on the leaf for the customer who wants to feel it, the word does nothing else. Underneath, the shopper who paid for organic and the one who could not are chewing the same field.

The people closest to the industry buy heads, not bags. Darin Detwiler, who teaches food policy at Northeastern and wrote a book on food safety, counts bagged greens among the riskiest things in the store and keeps them out of his own cart. A head is one plant from one field, and you wash it yourself. The bag is a thousand fields in one tank, where a single dirty leaf seeds the whole batch, so he buys the head and rinses it at his own sink. He has watched the recalls stack up, the hospitalizations, the lawyers, and he has drawn the conclusion the rest of us are still arguing our way toward at the shelf. The dollar bag and the eight-dollar bag went through the same wash tank. The fight was never about the leaf.

None of this arrived without warning, and the company at the center of it has stood in this exact spot before. On September 15, 2006, an FDA warning told the country to stop eating bagged spinach, and Drew McDonald, who ran food safety at Taylor Farms, was at an airport baggage claim in Hawaii with his wife and their baby girl when he saw it. The E. coli in those bags reached twenty-six states, hospitalized around a hundred people, and killed three. The scare cost California's leafy-green growers nearly a hundred million dollars, and out of it came the whole apparatus of leafy-green safety, the audits and metal detectors and rules, built to find a poisoned field and pull it before it reached the shelf.

Twenty years later the same company grew it in the same valley, underpaid the same hands to cut it, and bagged it the same way. Tracing the poison back to its acre is the one thing this industry does with genius, because even a parasite you cannot culture leaves a trail through the ruined guts of the people who ate it, and there is always a health office somewhere willing to interview two hundred of them and draw the line home.

There was supposed to be a rule. Farm to fork in hours instead of days, written into law after the romaine scares, set to take effect this past January. Grocers lobbied and the date moved to 2028. Then, last July, the Trump administration cut the federal program that tracks which bugs are poisoning Americans from eight pathogens down to two, and Cyclospora, the one that rode the bag into thirty-four states, was one of the six it stopped watching.

The same year, it fired one in five people at the FDA. No one made the growers test the leaf. The scientists who could have caught it spent last year with no money to buy the groceries they test.

The leaf that carries the sickness and the company that carries the profit are one thing wearing two labels, anonymous and unbranded and borderless, mixed past all telling into a single stream. One field pours into every bag, so a single tainted acre reaches five states while a single company wears the value label, the organic label, and the plaque on the wall at once, letting each of us believe we bought a different thing. The same reach that lets Taylor Farms feed the whole country lets one of its fields sicken it.

We keep reading the aisle as a set of choices. Cheap or fine, taco or clamshell, careless meal or careful one. It was one leaf the whole time, split at the end of the belt into the lives that can pay eight dollars and the lives that have one. Off the same wash line came the dollar taco and the eight-dollar clamshell, carrying the same passenger, offering the same protection, which was none. Seven extra dollars bought a word, and the word did the rest, teaching your hand which shelf to reach for and calling that reach a value.

Somewhere a hand moves past the drive-through bag and reaches for the clamshell that says organic, because it feels like the careful choice, the grown-up choice, the choice that loves you back. And yet the sticker is the only thing in that bag that was ever fresh. Two bags off one belt, arranged into a choice. You compared prices at the shelf, which was the whole idea, because a shopper comparing prices is a shopper not asking why no one had to make either bag safe. Someone chose the answer for us. They let the farm-to-fork tracing rule slide to 2028, killed the lab test that could spot the parasite, and cut the watch list from eight pathogens to two.

They sold us the bag again, the prewash, the four minutes we would not have to spend at the sink, the way they always have, and called it a choice. We paid at the register. Ninety-four of us paid in a hospital bed. The people who could have kept the parasite out of the leaf were never at the shelf. They found the field every time. They never once kept it clean.

Source: Facebook Post - Jermaine Fowler

Still Here! And Fully on Linux! - 5/11/2026

It's been awhile since I've last posted on here! I've been keeping busy with work, genealogical research, gaming with friends, spending time with my girlfriend, playing some Warframe, and getting back into gardening some.

I also upgraded all of my computers to Linux Mint finally! I've used some Linux before in school such as Ubuntu and Kali (for our cybersecurity class), but I never used it on my main computers. I upgraded my outdated and "super slow" laptop back on 1/29/2026 to Linux Mint, to which now runs rather fast compared to how it did when on Windows 10.
I then upgraded my gaming laptop sometime in March, and I upgraded my main gaming desktop computer to Linux this past Thursday (May 7th), which hosted my custom Minecraft server. Everything is going smooth, and I am happy that I don't have to rely on Windows 11 at home. I use that operating system at work though, so I can get more well-versed with computers.

Today, my sister from Arkansas graduates from her community college! I may post photos from that today maybe. I'm excited for her! She then heads to University of Arkansas next year. Her college will miss her as she's the unofficial mascot for the college. Shes's appeared in the news, representing her college.

A New Nature Post! - 2/13/2026

I made a new post in my Nature page, detailing my last fun day in the 2026 winter season. Please check it out!!

Nature Page!!

Hailey's Law - 2/5/2026

I'm trying to do my part in spreading awareness about this, but Hailey's Law is a petition to create a "Pink Alert" in the state of Indiana to create an alert for missing children that do not meet the requirements of an Amber Alert. It also would require schools in Indiana to increase awareness about online predators and their grooming and manipulative behaviors. Hailey Buzbee was a 17 year old child from Fishers who was an unfortunate victim to online grooming. Her story came to a horrific ending, but by supporting this petition in her name, the community in Fishers hopes to prevent children from sharing Hailey's fate, like countless others already have.

Please see the below links for ways to support Hailey's Law and Hailey's family in these times.

*I am not related in anyway to Hailey Buzbee or her family. I am just sharing images placed in the public domain to spread awareness to the maybe 1 or 2 people visiting this place*

Official Hailey Buzbee GoFundMe MealTrain for Food Gift Cards Change.Org Petition Page Silver Lining of Hope for Hailey

Slowly Moving Away from Windows - 1/29/2026

Like many others, I have been a long-time Windows user, at least ever since Windows 7. I absolutely loved the look of Windows 7 and Windows XP.

Unfortunately, I feel that the latest OS from Microsoft (Windows 11) is a tad bit invasive (screenshotting your activity??), so I have been wanting to move to something new. After some research and YouTube recommendations, I have decided to try Linux Mint on my very old slow laptop that was running Windows 10. I must say, I love the feel and look of it! And my "slow" laptop is no longer so slow without all of that bloatware that it likely had. I may actually use it more often, and even more, I am currently using it to write this post!

Life is going okay for me I'd say. I do my best to keep up to date, thanks to the lovely website The Almighty Guru. I highly recommend them to briefly keep up to date on the latest news.

I can't think of anything else to say currently, so thank you for your time today, and enjoy the life you have! It is ever so short.

A Small Update -12/24/2025

My website is starting to look fantastic to me. I've finally made progress on a dream that I've had long ago, and that was to move to my own platform instead of relying on social media giants like FB. Most of my areas here are polished, but Vamen Universe is an entire beast to tackle. Since it is its own website (considering it's an entire fictional world I created), it will be done on another day.

It is currently 1:33am, and I am very much tired. But I cannot stop working on this place. It's a good addiction I feel like. It is productive and fulfilling. I am getting stuff done.

Oh, and Merry Christmas Eve!!

My Second Test Post! -12/21/2025

I am making another post on here to test my layout. So far, it is working. I hope it continues to work as I upload more images to view. By the way, look at all of these older photos! I'm related to them in some way. Neat!

My First Ever Post! -12/21/2025

I am excited to say that I am making my first ever post on this website! It is simple, but rewarding. I have made major improvements to this site, such as adding a grid layout to the site to reduce clutter, keep everything in viewable range, and stuff. Also, attached are some cool pictures of yard spaces close to home. Enjoy!