As Foodborne Illnesses Surge, People Turn to Local Farms for Certainty

This summer, it has felt like the flow of Black folks and families arriving at Deep Roots CPS Farm in Charlotte, North Carolina, has never let up, said Cherie Jzar, the farm’s managing director.

They’re in search of something that has become harder to find in the grocery aisle: certainty.

They’re asking about lettuce — when and where you can best grow it — and how they can incorporate other vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers, and leafy greens into their diets.

Increasingly, Jzar has noted, they’re asking because they are worried about cyclospora, the parasite at the center of a sprawling national foodborne-illness outbreak tied in part to iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico.

Since June, the federal government has noted more than 22,000 cases in 47 states, over 500 hospitalizations, and at least two deaths related to the parasite.

“They are coming to us wanting to purchase from a trusted source,” said Jazar, co-founder of Deep Roots CPS Farm. “They tell us straight away, like, we’re looking to purchase because we’re concerned about the parasite.”

For Black farmers, the outbreak has become a stark reminder of why their work matters. In communities where generations of Black families have been pushed off farmland and shut out of healthy-food access, farms like Deep Roots are offering a chance to rebuild a relationship to the land and the people who grow what ends up on the table.

Jazar hopes the moment will push more Black consumers to seek out and invest in Black growers — not just during a food-safety crisis, but as a way to build a more self-sustaining local food system.

Across the country, Americans are turning to local growers. Farmers markets are experiencing record attendance and subscriptions for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms, where people can sign up for regularly distributed boxes of fresh produce, are on the rise.

“People need to be able to trust where their food comes from — that it’s been grown with care in a healthy manner,” Jazar said, and Black farmers are uniquely equipped to meet this moment. “Not only are they getting fresh, healthy produce, but they’re actually getting culturally relevant food, something they may not be able to get their hands on in the grocery store.”

Other Black farms, like Patrick Brown’s farm in Warren County, North Carolina, are also seeing an increase in supporters, but there are a few factors making it hard to meet the moment.

Brown said that farmers trying to meet that demand face rising expansion costs when trying to grow more, difficulty finding and training workers, and a lack of government support for small farm businesses.

“We got so many other obstacles in place that are in the way of expanding right now, not to mention a federal administration that is not supporting small-scale farmers,” he said.

The moment, he said, should encourage people not only to buy locally during a crisis, but to seek out farmers, CSAs, and food-distribution networks in their communities year-round. The Trump administration has rolled back federal support for minority-owned farms and cut programs that gave small farms hundreds of thousands in grants. Federal data shows that a majority of Black-operated farms report very low annual sales compared with all farms and are more likely to need grants.

Is It Safe to Eat Lettuce and Other Leafy Greens?

The outbreak does not mean consumers need to abandon lettuce or leafy greens altogether. Public health experts have cautioned against treating every fresh vegetable as suspect, noting that the vast majority of produce moving through stores is not connected to the outbreak. But for people seeking a more direct connection to their food, Brown said local farms can still grow lettuce in the summer through indoor high tunnels and greenhouses.

Brown and Jazar said the outbreak should also encourage people to homestead and grow food in their yards or empty lots in their communities.

Deep Roots began formally in 2019, after Jazar and her family spent years homesteading and growing food for themselves. The regenerative farm now grows seasonal fruits and vegetables and raises laying hens and poultry. It was built, Jazar said, to serve Charlotte residents living with limited access to affordable fresh food. It’s an alternative to an industrial food system that often leaves consumers disconnected from the people who grow what they eat.

What Can Consumers Do in the Meantime?

The outbreak has renewed scrutiny of the country’s sprawling produce supply chain, where food may pass through farms, processors, distributors, restaurants, and grocery stores before reaching a dinner table.

“When farms are growing the products, a lot of those farms then come together in a distribution center, and those products are co-mingled. There’s opportunities there for contamination,” said Kalmia Kniel, a professor in the Department of Animal and Food Sciences at the University of Delaware.

Cyclospora is a parasite spread through food or water contaminated with human feces. Infections can occur days or weeks after someone eats contaminated produce. The parasite’s long incubation period and the complexity of produce distribution can make outbreaks difficult to trace quickly.

Jazar tells her new customers that buying directly from a farmer can make the path from field to plate easier to understand. “If something were ever to happen to that produce, we could trace it easily back to our fields,” she said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh no, what happened? Where did I get this problem?’”

That direct relationship matters especially for Black communities, where food access has long been shaped by disinvestment, land loss, and the decline of Black farmers. Supporting Black-owned farms, Jazar said, is about sustaining local institutions that can feed, employ, and educate their own communities.

“If we want to have a sustained farming community that’s Black-run, we got to support those that are in our community,” she said.

Who’s to Blame for the Outbreaks?

The current crisis also arrives as the nation’s food-safety system faces strain. The Trump administration’s changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FoodNet program scaled back required active surveillance of cyclospora, though federal officials have said the change has not impaired their ability to identify or investigate outbreaks. Critics, including food-safety advocates and lawmakers, argue that cuts to public-health funding and staffing could still slow detection and weaken the country’s ability to understand foodborne disease over time.

“The workforce that we have available to us is frequently a limiting factor in this. There have been cuts at [the] state level and at the federal level for the amount of funds that go into support[ing] this type of activity,” said Craig Hedberg, an environmental health professor at the University of Minnesota.

The anxiety has extended beyond lettuce. This summer, a separate salmonella outbreak tied in part to recalled shell eggs from Texas had sickened people across 17 states.

At the same time, intensified immigration enforcement has sent fear through agricultural communities. Farmworkers — many of them immigrants — are essential to harvesting, processing, and moving produce through the food system. A recent survey by the United Farm Workers Foundation found widespread fear of detention and deportation among undocumented farmworkers, with respondents reporting that raids and deportations had affected their work.

There is currently no evidence that immigration raids caused this cyclospora outbreak.

For Jazar, the answer is not for people to stop eating fresh food. It is to build stronger relationships with growers and to rethink what fresh food can look like in season.

At Deep Roots, that might mean a summer salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, banana peppers, watermelon, feta, and basil instead of iceberg lettuce. It can also mean culturally familiar produce, such as fresh okra and tomatoes, that customers may struggle to find in conventional stores.

“Local farming is necessary. Black farmers are necessary,” Jazar said.