As of early July 19th, I had a whole note planned for you about what we know related to the cyclospora outbreak that I wrote about last week.
Now, there’s a recall. Taylor Farms de Mexico pulled all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico, including two products sold at Walmart under the Marketside brand (Iceberg Salad and Shredded Lettuce, use-by dates July 18 through August 3).
BUT! Of course, as I was ready to move on from this, it is 10:23pm PST as I am writing, FDA says Taylor Farms cyclospora finding was a false positive, so at this point, there are currently no confirmed positive product samples for cyclospora at all, not just for that one lot.
In wrapping my head around this, what I wanted to make clear is that the recalled lettuce went to 27 states, mostly the Midwest, South, and East Coast. And even if it didn’t affect your state, everything else stands:
Wash your produce well, cook it when you can, peel what peels.
Heat kills this parasite and the parasite lives on the surface, so those two habits cover you.
In the meanwhile, you do not need to swear off berries, bagged salad, or the produce aisle.
If you want to follow it yourself, the CDC page updates as things move.
Okay. Onto the part of summer I actually want to talk about.
Mercer Island Farmers Market
It’s peak farmers market season!
What a great time to go local.
Buying at a farmer’s market doesn’t magically protect you from foodborne illness. Contamination comes from water and soil, and that can happen at any scale. What a short supply chain does give you, though, is produce that didn’t go through a central processing facility where a single contaminated lot gets shredded, bagged, and shipped to 27 states in a week.
And you can just ask the vendor! Where was this grown? When was it picked, how do you wash it?
The other reason is summer, itself. Peak tomatoes. Stone fruit that’s soooo ripe. Corn, berries, zucchini, basil, galore... If you have anyone in your house who has decided vegetables are boring, a July farmers market is the strongest argument you’ll ever need to make!
A few things that make it work better:
Go with a loose plan, not a list. Buy what looks good, figure out dinner after. This is the place I’ll tell you to skip the dinner plan.
Bring the kids. Letting a kid pick one thing, any thing, is one of the most effective feeding strategies to help expose them to new foods.
Ask for the seconds. The bruised tomatoes and ugly peaches are usually cheaper and perfect for sauce, compote, or freezing.
Wash everything at home anyway. Local isn’t sterile. Same rules apply.
Wherever you are, this is the month to go!
Now the blog I really wanted to share
If you’ve ever been told to “just listen to your body” around food and thought, cool, except my body and I are not on speaking terms, I wrote something for you.
Years ago, when my daughter was little and wasn’t exactly following directions about something I really wanted her to do, a very wise child educator asked me a question:
Is it that she can’t, or that she won’t?
OOF do I think about that often.
Because when someone tells me they wish they could just eat intuitively, that they’ve read the book and tried the thing and it just doesn’t click, I believe them. It isn’t for lack of trying.
Most of the time it’s a can’t.
Years of dieting, eating disorder recovery, chronic stress or trauma, being neurodivergent, certain meds and medical conditions, running on no sleep, being on or coming off a GLP-1... Any of these can scramble the connection between your body and your brain so the signals get muffled or drowned out entirely.
Handing someone in that spot a trust-your-body-pep-talk is a little cruel. You’re asking them to use a sense they don’t have access to (at least not right now).
It means eating on a schedule instead of waiting for hunger to show up: roughly three meals and two to three snacks, every three to four hours, whether or not your body sends the signal.
No, not a calorie count or a strict plan to follow. This is a temporary scaffold that helps you nourish yourself, while your body relearns how to send you clear signals.
Once those signals come back online, mechanical eating hands the wheel back to you. It’s the bridge to intuitive eating, not a replacement for it.
You can’t skip half the freeway just because you know where you’re headed.
In the new blog I get into who this is actually for, the science of why your cues went dark in the first place, and how to tell if it’s the missing step for you. Read it here. And let me know what you think!
Have a great week,
P.S. The meal-planning beta group is still taking shape and the early-interest list is filling in nicely. Think of it as co-working, but in the kitchen: we plan the week together, trade ideas, and actually get it done in the room instead of adding it to the someday list. Once a month to start, billable through insurance for folks whose plans cover group sessions, small out-of-pocket otherwise. Hit reply and I will make sure you’re first to know when we set a date.
