You're right that Mexico has a better climate for growing fresh produce, it's where Canada also gets a large portion of out-of-season produce from as well.

If I understand correctly, the reason as to why there is a significant spike in food contamination & infection/illness in the US is due largely to the rollback of funding & legislation by the current administration, which makes it more difficult for those in the food inspection & quality control sectors to work effectively for consumers.

Another workaround could be to buy frozen produce, as there doesn't seem to be a lot of news about contaminated frozen fruit & veg. Hopefully, at least!

For the most part the lettuce issue has passed. It was linked to Taylor farms and the impacted lettuce has essentially all met the expiry date at this point.

However as you’ve mentioned this years been rough. Taylor farms also had the jalapeño salmonella issue, which is ongoing. Midwest poultry recalled 1.6 million eggs, also for salmonella.

It’s generally good if you avoid those vendors though, but maybe stay away from jalapeños for a bit because Taylor supplies a LOT of the industry (Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, etc have had subsequent recalls of things like guacamole made with the jalapeños)

Awesome fact: Taylor farms donated over 2 million to trump and conservative pacs in 2025, including 1 million to maga inc. and the lobby they are a part of heavily pushed to change rules about tracing outbreaks like this, about a decade ago they lobbied successfully to defund foodborne illness pathogen testing (cutting testing by about 80%), and they paid over $800k to lobby related to “food regulation”, which was potentially related to using irrigation water in farming. Farmers are supposed to have to test irrigation water because it’s frequently linked to outbreaks starting in 2025 for large farms with smaller ones over 2026/7.

So basically farmers, including Taylor farms with serious bank, have systematically broken down systems related to food safety to increase profits while literally causing death. About 3k people die per year of foodborne illness but 2026 is shaping to be a significant increase, both in mortality and number of incidents. The rising number of incidents is potentially attributable to the huge amount of cuts to federal policy about this and the increasing number of incidents combined with decreased funding means response is far slower. It’s probably going to get worse

I have never been to a BK that has their burgers pre-made. They have enough variety on their menu and adjustments on orders that it surely can't be worth anticipating things like that. Assembling a burger takes less than a minute once everything is cooked.

The average subway worker probably wouldn't know who their suppliers are, but I doubt it's a secret. They likely use the same regional suppliers other restaurants do. The manager could probably tell you.

You know, if you don't specify that you're wanting help on restaurant food, you're going to keep getting generalized answers focused on food safety you can directly control

Fast food places don't assemble cold ingredients with hot ingredients until ordered. It's a big part of the reason why burgers with lettuce tend to cost more at those places.

Taco Bell still has lettuce in their stores. They only pulled certain lettuce from certain sources and warned customers that not every store might have lettuce available for a few days, but any shortage didn't last long and they have been able to serve food with lettuce in most places the entire time.

If you're that concerned about this outbreak, you should probably catch up on the information of how these things work.

Sounds great on paper.

It's clearly meant for those who cook. But since you seem to like fast food, let's see...

I wouldn't expect the sales front to know very much, so. A (honest) manager might be a good start, allowing you to compare their notes against whatever other sources you could find, most of which would probably be online. At a nearby cantina I go to, the shift manager actually listed out his three suppliers. Another useful bit of data.

This is the kind of thing I might also try GPT on, which is good for complex searches that pull a bunch of data together as summaries.

But yeah-- get online and see who's complaining about symptoms, and where they likely ate from. See who's done the research and hear where their confidences lie. Build a Venn diagram to help you get a sense for the safest-possible FF places / regionals to eat from. Et cetera...

I don't understand your logic. It's not like with bird flu where they cull them and it's 2 years before egg prices went back to normal.

They can discard every jalapeno grown in California. There would still be jalapenos grown elsewhere that are fine.

its just advice not an order. people can do what they like. I stopped eating out at sitdown long back because of cost and a few years back even with fast food costs.