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Week after week, our vegetables, fruit, and flowers overflow three tables, and our sign proudly announces, “We Grow What We Sell.” This assures our customers that we are 100 percent accountable for the organic and soil-building practices that yield our ripe heirloom tomatoes, sweet melons, and everything else displayed at our stand.

Thousands of people have gotten sick and two have died from cyclospora, and recent conversations with our customers have revolved around the safety of fresh produce like leafy greens, herbs, and berries.

Those of us behind the counter explain that, like most farmers’ produce, ours is generally picked the day before market, driven to our packing shed, washed in fresh well water, and stacked in the walk-in refrigerator before it’s loaded on a truck. We always pass our annual third-party food safety inspections, comply with all of California’s strict labor laws, and have a robust training program for our crews.

The shredded iceberg lettuce identified as a major source of the latest cyclospora outbreak was imported from Mexico by a massive producer, Taylor Farms, which has processing facilities in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and Europe, and supplies Walmart, Taco Bell, and Target, among others.

Industrial fresh-cut processors like Taylor Farms have a very different production model compared to that of a small-scale farmer—and this difference is worth considering when you buy greens.

That process is dominated by a handful of huge corporations that run higher risks of releasing foodborne pathogens like cyclospora into the food supply, while also producing significant plastic and water waste.

For the U.S. market, the bagged lettuce and fresh-cut bagged leafy greens industry combines mechanically harvested greens from farms in multiple states and countries.

In large facilities that can process tens of thousands of heads of lettuce in an hour, the greens are de-cored, chopped and mixed together, then rinsed in chilled water combined with sanitizer or chlorine.

Finally they are packaged in special plastic bags and flushed with a mix of gases to displace oxygen and to slow down browning.

This process carries a higher risk of foodborne pathogen contamination, because a single contaminated leaf can cross-contaminate an entire commercial batch of thousands of bags. The fresh-cut industry is frequently linked to multi-state recalls and disease outbreaks.

In fact, Taylor Farms’ recall notice on July 17 was for bagged products that carry a health risk from cyclospora: salad mixes, shredded lettuce, chopped lettuce, and lettuce blends. (The same company had to recall jalapeño peppers, this time because of salmonella contamination, also from Mexico, only a few weeks after it recalled the bagged greens.)

FDA messaging about the outbreak has been confusing, and there are reports that Taylor Farms asked the White House to intervene during the investigation, a maneuver that few small-scale farmers would ever attempt.

Cyclospora, a microscopic parasite, is spread through the feces of infected people; humans are its only known host. Contaminated irrigation or packing-shed water, or workers’ unwashed hands, spread the parasite to produce.

In some rural areas, the problem can come from leaking septic tanks, contaminating rivers and surface water. Cyclospora does not transmit from person to person, because it only becomes infectious weeks after leaving the body. Because it isn’t a bacteria, it can’t be killed by chlorine or other common anti-microbials.