We’re all amateur food safety inspectors now

I’m standing in the produce aisle of my neighborhood supermarket, between the fresh vegetables receiving their bi-hourly overhead mist and a long refrigerated wall of salad kits. Lately, the store has been running sales on the Taylor Farms ones. The discount tags have been placed, carefully it seems to me, directly over the Taylor Farms logo, giving the display the slightly furtive quality of merchandise that has recently acquired an unfortunate reputation.

Nobody appears especially eager to buy them.

Thankfully, I’m not there to buy one either.

Instead, I pull out my phone and open an app called Taylor Detector, which is exactly what it sounds like. Scan the barcode of a grocery item and the app tells you whether it has a documented connection to Taylor Farms — including connections that may not be obvious from the package.

There really is, apparently, an app for everything.

Taylor Detector was created by programmer Jonathan Goldner, whose other projects include Air Aware, which tracks air quality, pollen and environmental health risks, and Friday Night Lights, which reminds users when it is time to light Shabbat candles. His portfolio, taken together, suggests a particular interest in the invisible forces governing everyday life: particulates, sundown, industrial produce conglomerates.

I start scanning.

One salad kit: no.

Another: no.

For a moment, Taylor Detector is an exceptionally boring slot machine. Then I round the corner toward the bagged vegetables and point my phone at a package of Earthbound Farm broccoli florets.

The screen turns red.

CONFIRMED.

“Oh,” I think.

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This is how I learn that Earthbound Farm is owned by Taylor Farms, as is Eat Smart. The company also supplies private-label and store-brand packaged salad greens and kits for numerous major retailers from Whole Foods to Kroger to Aldi. 

That small revelation — broccoli in hand, phone glowing red — gets at the gap Goldner says he built the app to address. Shoppers trying to identify Taylor Farms products themselves have occasionally been advised to look for packaging codes beginning with “TF” or similar letters. But there is no standardized public key for deciphering them; codes vary among plants and products, and the absence of an obvious “TF” is no guarantee Taylor Farms wasn’t involved.

In his FAQ, Goldner puts the problem plainly: consumers shouldn’t have to be “decoding packaging on the fly.”

Which, when you think about it, is an extraordinary activity to have entered the modern grocery-shopping repertoire.

But there is a reason people are trying.

Taylor Farms has spent much of the summer at the center of a strange and confusing food-safety story. And this week brought another recall: The company pulled prepared foods, including salsa and guacamole sold under brands such as Trader Joe’s and Walmart’s Freshness Guaranteed, after receiving jalapeños connected to a multistate Salmonella outbreak.

We have entered a moment when the government tells Americans to scrutinize their food, corporations operate supply chains consumers can barely see, and states and Washington are fighting over who gets to regulate them — and someone has responded by building an app so I can stand in the produce aisle and scan my vegetables to determine who, exactly, is behind them.

That’s somewhat funny.

It is also an awfully revealing picture of where American trust in the food system is right now.

When Taylor Farms went to the White House

In July, FDA traceback and epidemiological evidence linked shredded iceberg lettuce produced by Taylor Farms to a major Cyclospora outbreak. Then came a confusing correction: A product sample the agency had initially described as positive was later determined to be a false positive. Taylor Farms used the revision to push back on the idea that its lettuce had been definitively identified as the source; federal officials, though, maintained that the broader epidemiological and traceback evidence still pointed there.

As if that were not enough to make the average salad eater develop a mild interest in supply-chain forensics, the story soon acquired a political subplot.

Taylor Farms and its CEO, Bruce Taylor, have donated millions to conservative and Republican-aligned political groups, including a $1 million contribution to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. in 2025. In July, as scrutiny of the outbreak intensified, company executives and lobbyists met privately with the White House. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, subsequently demanded answers about both the outbreak and the circumstances surrounding that meeting.

None of that establishes that political access changed the government’s response. But the optics are almost laboratory-designed to produce suspicion: A company tied to a sprawling foodborne-illness investigation, whose leadership has given substantial sums to the president’s political operation, gets an emergency audience at the White House while regulators and the company publicly disagree about what the evidence means.

This is also an administration that very much wants Americans thinking harder about their food.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who recently added cooking-show host to his duties at HHS, presiding over salmon cakes and homemade vinaigrette on “The Real Food Show” — has made distrust of the conventional American food system one of his signature themes. The show promises to teach Americans how to eat “real food,” presenting recognizable ingredients and home cooking as an antidote to a processed-food culture portrayed as artificial, addictive and imposed from above.

This week, Kennedy carried that project further, promising the federal government’s first official definition of ultra-processed food. Scientists do not currently agree on exactly what belongs in that category, a problem Kennedy summarized with characteristic bluntness: “If you can’t define a problem, you can’t solve it.”

Fair enough.

But the ideal MAHA consumer occupies a curious position. She should be discerning. She should read labels, mistrust mysterious additives, interrogate old nutritional orthodoxies and learn to distinguish “real” food from whatever came before it. She should, perhaps, even become a little suspicious.

Just not indiscriminately so.

Because once that skepticism travels backward through the supply chain — past the emulsifiers and dyes, toward corporate ownership, political donations, private meetings and the government agencies charged with keeping food safe — the questions become rather less tidy.

Discernment is encouraged. Distrust is curated.

When the recalls blur

Back in the produce aisle, the app has done exactly what it promised.

I now know that the broccoli florets in my hand have a documented connection to Taylor Farms.

What I do not know is whether that means I should put them back.

I have not received a recall alert for broccoli. There is no red banner telling me this particular bag is unsafe. And Taylor Farms is hardly the only name appearing in food-safety notices lately: Recent recalls have involved tomato bisque soup over possible Listeria contamination, a Chinese-style spice mix over possible Salmonella and blueberries over possible E. coli.

At a certain point, the alerts begin to blur together.

Taylor Detector can tell me who is behind the package. It cannot tell me what level of risk I should assign to that fact.

That part is still mine.

Which may be the strangest feature of this new age of food vigilance. Americans are being encouraged to become sharper, more suspicious consumers — to read more closely, question more aggressively and demand to know what is really in their food. But information arrives in fragments: a barcode result here, a recall notice there, a corrected FDA finding, a corporate statement, a congressional inquiry.

The broccoli remains broccoli.

I am simply standing in front of it with considerably more information than I had five minutes ago, and no corresponding increase in certainty. So I make the decision myself — and leave it behind.

Maybe I’ll have better luck at the farmers market.