By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Another day, another E. coli outbreak. In the last half of 2024 alone, E. coli has been found in ground beef, carrots, onions, walnuts and cheese, causing at least 186 illnesses, one death and several recalls. Why is E. coli popping up left and right — and what do these outbreaks have to do with factory farms?

The answers to these questions, respectively, are “we don’t know” and “a lot.” Harmful E. coli is produced primarily in the guts of ruminant animals, such as cows, sheep, goats and deer, and as a result, it’s often found in beef. It can easily infect other foods as well — but even when it does, beef production and cattle farms are often still the ultimate source of the contamination.

This can play out in several ways, but it’s important to note at the outset that there’s still a lot we don’t know about E. coli transmission. Often, researchers can’t identify with certainty the original source of contamination, and can only speculate on the path it took to reach whatever food it ultimately infected. The bacteria itself also changes and adapts over time, complicating these post-outbreak analyses even further.

“With many of the outbreaks, [investigators] cannot find the source of the infection,” Alfredo Torres, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, tells Sentient. “There are all sorts of contaminations that we have no idea where they’re coming from.”

What Is E. Coli?

E. coli, or Escherichia coli, comes in many different varieties. The majority of them are harmless, and some serve important purposes in the human body, but there are six subvarieties of E. coli bacteria — often referred to as “The Big Six” — that can cause illness in humans.

In the United States, most E. coli outbreaks are caused by the strain O157:H7. This strain belongs to a group of E. coli subtypes called Shiga-toxin producing E. coli, or STEC. As the name implies, the STEC varieties of E. coli produce a toxin called Shiga, and when we talk of humans becoming sick with E. coli, it’s usually the Shiga toxin that’s responsible for causing the actual illness.

While there’s a lot that scientists still don’t understand about STEC, it’s believed that the bacteria’s initial development must take place in the intestinal tract of certain non-human animals, namely cows and other ruminants. From there, it can spread to humans in a number of ways, but to the best of scientists’ current understanding, it can’t develop in the first place without a ruminant’s gut.

Humans contract harmful E. coli strains by eating contaminated food and or water, interacting with infected animals or people, or coming into contact with feces with E. coli in it. It can be highly contagious; in 1993, a sixteen month-old boy died from E. coli after coming into contact with the stool of a classmate who had the disease.

Although this was an example of human-to-human transmission of the bacteria, it still began with a cow: The classmate’s mother worked at Jack In The Box, the source of the outbreak.

E. coli can produce a variety of symptoms. When it infects the large intestine, it can result in diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, stomach cramps and loss of appetite; when the bacteria is in the urinary tract, it causes pain during urination, cloudy urine and abdominal or pelvic pain.

Although most people who become sick from E. coli recover within a week or so, some patients develop serious and life-threatening conditions, such as haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) and sepsis. Studies on the mortality rate of E. coli infections have come to a wide range of conclusions, from eight percent on the low end to 35 percent on the high end.

Where Does E. Coli Come From?

E. coli lives in many places, but the “Big Six” subtypes that sicken humans are all found primarily in the bodies of cattle, Torres tells Sentient.

“The bacteria can actually grow in the rectal anal junction of these animals without causing any disease, or any symptoms, or anything,” Torres says. “So when [the cows defecate], the fecal matter is contaminated with this organism, and anything that gets in contact with the manure, or water contaminated with the fecal matter, can get contaminated with the bacteria.”

Historically, E. coli outbreaks in the United States came from tainted beef, Torres says. The O157:H7 strain was first discovered in 1982, when 47 people contracted it after eating contaminated burgers from McDonald’s. The 1992 E. coli outbreak, which killed four people and sickened over 500, also originated from beef patties, this time from Jack In The Box.

The Jack In The Box outbreak received significant media attention and became something of a national scandal. In response, the USDA subsequently implemented a number of regulations to prevent beef from being contaminated with E. coli, and fast food restaurants implemented operational changes, such as separating beef patties with tongs instead of bare hands, in an attempt to accomplish the same.

These changes did reduce the frequency of beef-originated E. coli outbreaks, Torres says, but they didn’t put an end to the outbreaks entirely. The harmful strains of E. coli may originate in a cow’s gut, but they can survive in other environments as well. And thanks to this resilience, E. coli has the ability to infect plenty of foods other than meat.

How Factory Farms Cause E. Coli Outbreaks

Given E. coli’s affinity for cow intestines, it’s no surprise that cattle farms and slaughterhouses are often the source of E. coli outbreaks. Typically, this happens when E. coli in the cow’s gut cross-contaminates the rest of his or her body during the slaughtering process, and ends up in the resulting beef.

But because E. coli is found in manure as well as the body, anything that comes into contact with manure is also liable to be infected. This includes water — and unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for manure from cattle farms to make its way into nearby waterways. (The disease can also spread via human waste in waterways, but only if the human in question had already contracted E. coli).

There’s good reason to believe that this leakage, or runoff, contributes to the spread of E. coli. A 2023 study found that water samples taken from sources within a mile of factory farms had higher concentrations of E. coli than those located more than five miles away from said farms.

This year, an FDA study found that waterways contained a higher prevalence of STEC stains of E. coli in particular when they passed by factory farms. This occurred even when there was no apparent runoff from the farms to the water, leading researchers to speculate that the bacteria latched on to dust from the farms and traveled to the water via the air.

Complicating matters further is the fact that E. coli can also live in the leaves of certain vegetables. This was evident in 2006, when tainted spinach caused a massive nationwide E. coli outbreak that killed three people, sickened over 200, and depressed spinach sales for over a year.

The Spinach Outbreak: a Case Study in Uncertainty

The spinach incident is a good illustration of how E. coli outbreaks occur — and of why even vegetable-based outbreaks can often be traced back to meat production.

“That was the first time we learned that somehow, the bacteria is able to survive in leaves of spinach,” Torres tells Sentient. “If you use a microscope and you look inside of a leaf, there’s an area called the stroma, and you can actually find the bacteria attached to that area.”

The fact that E. coli can survive within the biological structure of spinach itself, as opposed to simply living in water on the surface of spinach, means that washing contaminated spinach isn’t sufficient to rid it of the bacteria.

Subsequent investigations of the 2006 outbreak found that the contaminated spinach originated from a single grower in California, and investigators were even able to trace it back to a specific ranch in San Benito County. That ranch was located next to a cattle farm, and manure and river water from the cattle farm was later found to have the same strain of E. coli that contaminated the spinach.

But incredibly, despite all of these findings, investigators weren’t able to determine precisely how the spinach became infected in the first place. They speculated that tainted river water could have made its way into the well that irrigated the spinach fields, or alternatively, that a wayward cow or pig might have inadvertently transferred the bacteria from the cattle farm to the spinach.

Nevertheless, a spokesperson for the California Department of Health said at the time that “we’ll never be able to make a definitive link” between the cattle farm and the spinach ranch.

The whole episode encapsulates an unfortunate truth about E. coli outbreaks: we often don’t get a full picture of how exactly they unfolded. We know that the disease originates in the stomachs of cows and a few other species, but the path it takes to infect humans is often impossible to fully understand.

Take the recent McDonald’s outbreak. Contaminated onions are believed to be the culprit here — but how did they get contaminated in the first place?

The short answer is that we don’t know. In an interview with Sentient earlier in the year, public health expert Sarah Sorscher said that the onions were “probably being processed in an environment with ground beef or some other high-risk food” that already had E. coli. Torres, meanwhile, suggests that they may have been contaminated via tainted water.

But these are merely guesses — educated guesses, to be sure, but guesses nonetheless. As of this writing, the precise manner in which the onions and carrots became contaminated with E. coli is unknown, and it’s entirely possible that it will never be known. Such is the nature of E. coli outbreaks.

But one thing is for sure: eventually, it always comes back to poop. And factory farms present the perfect opportunity for this poop to make its way into drinking water. Manure from these farms is typically stored in enormous outdoor lagoons, which can — and do — easily leak into nearby waterways.

How Can We Prevent E. Coli Outbreaks?

The federal government has taken a number of steps to lessen the risk of E. coli outbreaks. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) of the USDA tests random samples of raw beef for E. coli before they’re sent to restaurants or retailers, and conducts regular inspections of produce farms.

But the government can’t test every piece of spinach or beef before it’s sent out into the world. The ambiguous and confusing nature of E. coli spread means that ultimately, it’s on individual farms to implement and follow best practices that can help stem the prevalence of outbreaks.

Some of these practices are mandated by the government, while others have been developed and voluntarily adopted by producers. Since 1996, the FDA has required meat and poultry producers to implement an inspection system called HACCP, or Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, to catch potential contaminations before sending their product to distributors.

But these kinds of rules are only effective if agricultural producers abide by them, and sometimes they don’t. The processor of the tainted spinach behind the 2006 outbreak, for instance, hadn’t been following its own water-inspection policies in the month that the tainted spinach was processed, a subsequent investigation found.

The FDA can warn, fine and even shutter facilities that ignore food safety practices. But much of the time, this only happens after there’s been an outbreak. In 2017, the FDA shut down Dixie Dew Products after discovering numerous food safety violations at its production facility — but only after the company’s soy nut butter gave E. coli to 29 people, nine of whom developed kidney failure as a result.

The Bottom Line

E. coli is something of a moving target. The ways in which it infects food still aren’t fully understood, and the government has at times been slow in implementing policies to reduce the frequency of outbreaks (the FDA only rolled out comprehensive safety rules for produce in 2016, for example). The fact that the bacteria keeps popping up in new foods creates yet another challenge.

One thing is clear, however: Industrial animal agriculture, and cattle farms in particular, are central to the spread of E. coli. While operational and regulatory steps can be taken to reduce the risk, E. coli’s prevalence on cattle farms is an unavoidable and intrinsic consequence of how the cow’s digestive system works. As long as we’re farming cattle for food, we’re going to be dealing with E. coli.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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The future looks promising for green energy and manufacturing in Appalachia, and states like West Virginia are slated to receive around $1 billion in federal investment since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, according to experts at ReImagine Appalachia's virtual strategy summit held earlier this week.

A Reimagine Appalachia report has found West Virginia and other Appalachian states are home to a higher-than-average share of manufacturing employment.

Jacob Hannah, CEO of Huntington-based nonprofit Coalfield Development, explained large manufacturing facilities are moving into the state, bringing new local jobs along with them.

"They're focused on localizing energy production at their sites," Hannah pointed out. "Because they consume a lot of energy and they're focused on workforce development because they need to hire a lot of folks and train a lot of folks."

Last year the Biden administration announced $475 million for projects in West Virginia and other states to boost clean energy development on current and former mine land. The funds will be used in Nicholas County to repurpose two former coal mines with utility-scale solar infrastructure, to power around 39,000 homes and create hundreds of construction jobs.

Solar development on degraded land and brownfields is expected to increase, along with use of residential solar. West Virginia's Office of Energy received $106 million last year from the Environmental Protection Agency's Solar for All
program to install solar panels on homes and reduce utility costs for low-income residents.

Mustafa Santiago Ali, executive vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, said continued federal investment is needed to help Appalachian residents build in healthy and thriving communities.

"We need to ensure communities without clean air and water, especially those suffering disproportionate environmental burdens from years of disinvestment and legacy pollution, get the funding and support that they need," Santiago Ali urged.

Green industries manufacturing alternatives to plastic including biodegradable and mycelium-based products are also on the horizon as potential regional economic drivers.


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Experts agree climate-smart agriculture will be critical in the fight against climate change. But with a divided Congress and no update to the Farm Bill since 2018, those who support New Mexico farmers are worried.

Sayrah Namaste, program co-director for the American Friends Service Committee, regularly meets with farmers who provide food to local schools. She said many tell her their mitigation efforts are outpaced and unlike the old days, they cannot ask experienced farmers for advice about such things as the best date to plant crops or when to expect the first frost.

"It's accelerating so fast that it's hard to even keep up with what they need to do," Namaste pointed out. "You know, it used to be you had guideposts, you had dates and it's not anymore. The climate is so chaotic that it's very hard to know, and that's just not happened for generations of farmers."

Congress was scheduled to update the 2018 Farm Bill in 2023, but a failure to agree on what's included delayed it to 2024 and now, again until next September. In addition to crop insurance, farm subsidies and U.S. Department of Agriculture conservation programs, the enormous farm bill includes the federal food stamp program, animal health, disaster preparedness and more.

Namaste noted to cope with climate change, New Mexico farmers plant a diversity of crops and sequence them to make sure they have at least one successful crop if others fail. She added the American Friends Service Committee will encourage lawmakers to support small-scale sustainable farms to give those who grow food a fighting chance.

"Record-breaking heat for weeks, or the largest wildlife in New Mexico history, or a drought that's the biggest in a century," Namaste outlined. "Those are really hard odds for farmers to be up against."

In 2022, New Mexico experienced its largest and most destructive wildfire in the state's history. Climate scientists recently confirmed 2024 was the hottest year on record, with damages from U.S. weather disasters estimated at more than $1 billion.

By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

The revolving door isn’t just something you get stuck in while attempting to enter a hotel. It’s also a political phenomenon that creates all sorts of conflicts of interest throughout the American government. While not illegal, the revolving door is certainly unsavory, and even has deep impacts on the food we eat.

“Revolving door” refers to a cycle in which individuals alternate between working in the private sector and serving in the government as regulators of that sector; in this context, “regulator” can mean an employee of a regulatory agency, a lawmaker or any public official who plays some role in regulatory policy.

“Whether you are moving from the public sector to industry, or vice versa, there are incentives to look after your future self,” Silvia Secchi, professor and researcher at the University of Iowa’s Public Policy Center, tells Sentient. “You could be more lenient on the private sector in the way you implement regulations, or the way you assess fines in your regulatory capacity, because you think that’s going to help you in the future.”

The revolving door is usually a bidirectional, ongoing process, but it can also simply be a one-time switch from one sector to another.

Why Is the Revolving Door a Problem?

The revolving door gives industries an outsized, and sometimes even dominant, role in shaping the laws and regulations to which they are subject. In the worst-case scenarios, it can lead to something called regulatory capture — when an industry succeeds in fully co-opting the agency that regulates it.

Somebody who worked as a regulator has detailed insider knowledge of how the regulatory process works, loopholes and all. This knowledge is very useful for businesses seeking to avoid regulation, which gives heavily regulated industries a strong incentive to hire former regulators.

Meanwhile, the revolving door incentivizes lawmakers and regulators to implement industry-friendly policies while in government, as this can lead to well-paid jobs in those same industries after leaving government. These same folks might also be hesitant to enact regulations that would significantly disturb those industries, lest they jeopardize their employment prospects after leaving government.

“Basically, you remain friendly to industry,” Secchi says of those who move through the revolving door. “Not necessarily to one specific entity in the industry, but to industry as a whole. Which means that you remain marketable once you leave the administration, or once you leave government writ large.”

Corruption From the Revolving Door Can Be Hard to Trace

In one sense, the revolving door process unfolds transparently; hirings are usually a matter of public record, and are often announced eagerly in press releases. Even when they’re not, it’s easy enough to look at an official’s LinkedIn page and trace their employment history.

In another sense, though, the process is extremely opaque. Hirings may be public record, but the conversations and decisionmaking that results from those hirings are not. They take place behind closed doors, and usually stay that way; regulators generally don’t come out and say, “I’ve implemented weaker chemical regulations than I otherwise would have, because I want to get hired by a chemicals company after I leave government.”

As a result, it can be difficult to trace a precise path of causation from a revolving door hire to a specific public policy. But there are plenty of revolving door situations that, if nothing else, look mighty suspicious.

Revolving Door Case Study #1: School Lunches

Every five years, the USDA and HHS jointly publish updates to the Dietary Guidelines For Americans (DGA), a lengthy document of nutritional recommendations that influences wide swaths of public food policy. One such policy is the national school lunches program; by law, menu offerings in school lunches must adhere to the DGA’s recommendations.

In 2015, when it was time for the DGA to be updated, the committee that drafts the document recommended that the next version take planetary health, as well as personal health, into consideration. This would have been a radical change, and because plant-based foods are almost uniformly better for the environment than animal-based ones, it would almost certainly have resulted in plants comprising a much larger portion of school lunches than they do now.

But before the next version of the DGA could be published, Congress passed an appropriations bill stating that the DGA’s recommendations must be “solely nutritional and dietary in nature.” This effectively forbade the USDA and HHS from taking environmental factors into concern when drafting the new DGA, and so they didn’t.

Why did Congress squash the environmentally focused DGA? It’s impossible to know for certain, but it’s also impossible to ignore who was passing through the revolving door as this whole episode was playing out.

In the beginning of 2015, Sen. Pat Roberts hired a load of new staffers to run the Senate Agriculture Committee, which he headed. This committee would go on to draft the appropriations bill that restrained the DGA — and Roberts stacked it with food industry lobbyists.

As chief of staff, Roberts hired Joel Leftwich, a senior lobbyist for PepsiCo who’s passed through the revolving door many, many times. The new head of livestock and food safety issues on the committee was Chelsie Keys, a lobbyist for the National Pork Producers Council. Other new committee staffers included Julian Baer, a longtime food industry lobbyist, and Matt Erickson, formerly a lawyer for the American Farm Bureau.

If the DGA had been updated to include environmental concerns, it would have hurt the bottom lines of both PepsiCo, which has been sued for pollution by multiple state and local governments, and the pork industry, which has a strong presence in school lunches.

We’ll probably never know for certain if the Senate staffers who used to work for Pepsi and Big Pork played a role in killing a policy that would have hurt Pepsi and Big Pork. But they were certainly in a position to do so, and had an incentive to as well. They had, as Sherlock Holmes might put it, both motive and opportunity.

Revolving Door Case Study #2: Tom Vilsack

A classic case of a “revolver,” as the nonprofit information site Open Secrets likes to refer to them, is outgoing USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Vilsack served two terms as Iowa governor, briefly worked as a lobbyist, and was then appointed by President Obama to head the USDA. After eight years as Secretary of Agriculture, Vilsack left government to work for the dairy industry, becoming vice president of Dairy Management, Inc (DMI) and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, one of DMI’s subsidiaries.

These are just two of many interrelated trade organizations that exist to bolster the U.S. dairy industry and promote the interests of American dairy farmers. In his dual positions as vice president and CEO, Vilsack earned a salary of nearly $1 million, according to public records — more than four times what he made as a public official.

In 2021, Vilsack returned to the public sector, serving as Secretary of Agriculture under President Biden.

What sorts of policies were impacted by Vilsack’s movement through the revolving door? Secchi tells Sentient that it’s not a matter of “a specific policy that will favor one specific industry,” but rather, the fact that Vilsack “has always been incredibly friendly to Big Ag, of which Big Dairy is a manifestation.”

But Secchi does point out that, when the time came for the USDA to distribute Inflation Reduction Act funds to “climate-smart” initiatives, Vilsack opted to send much of the money to powerful, well-established organizations in the agriculture sector.

“He gave money to Tyson, he gave money to the National Pork Board, he gave money to Land O’ Lakes,” Secchi says. “If you look at the beneficiaries of that money, they are largely conventional, large scale entities.”

So, after making millions working for Big Ag in the private sector, Vilsack returned to the federal government and gave millions to Big Ag. He did so under the auspices of the USDA’s climate-smart program; the fact that beef, pork and butter production are nowhere near “climate-smart” is the icing on the cake.

Revolving Door Case Study #3: Pesticide Regulation at the EPA

The EPA’s pesticide division offers another helpful, if discouraging, example of the revolving door at work.

Jim Jones (no relationship to the cult leader) is a former pesticide regulator. He worked at the EPA for 20 years in a number of capacities, including Director of the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) and Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP).

During his tenure, a chemical company called Vive Crop Protection requested EPA approval for an insecticide containing bifenthrin, a Class C carcinogen. Normally, such approval would require extensive inhalation testing; however, the OPP waived that requirement, according to a report in the Intercept, and approved the insecticide.

After leaving the EPA, Jones joined the board of directors at Vive Crop Protection. In 2017, he became executive vice president of the Household and Commercial Products Association; while there, he boasted of the organization’s “strong and mutually respectful relationship with the EPA [which] continues to give members direct access to officials at every pertinent level of the agency,” according to the Intercept.

In 2023, Jones returned to the public sector to serve as Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods at the FDA, where he remains to this day.

Jones is not an anomaly. Since 1974, the OPP has had nine directors; two went into retirement immediately after departing the EPA, but the other seven all went on to work for the pesticide industry after leaving their positions as regulators. Other EPA officials have gone on to work for Monsanto, Scotts Miracle-Gro and DuPont.

As of 2019, 72 pesticides that had been banned in the European Union were still legal in America.

The Revolving Door Leads to Consolidation and Deregulation

The revolving door does more than just influence individual policies here and there, Secchi says. It’s also created a culture in government in which regulators are encouraged not to crack down too hard on the industries they’re regulating.

“It’s not necessarily a direct, simple connection between one individual, one industry and one job,” Secchi tells Sentient. “It’s more like a whole culture of, you know, patting ourselves on the back, and not enacting policies that may question the primacy and the overall approach of conventional agriculture.”

The revolving door also intersects with a trend in the agriculture industry known as consolidation. This is when larger producers and conglomerates buy smaller companies or put them out of business en masse, resulting in less competition, fewer farms, and more power and money in the hands of the richest agricultural producers.

“In the 1950s, there was still a sizable population that was engaged in agriculture,” Secchi explains. “The number of farms was much larger, the number of farmers was much larger. But now there are very, very few farmers.”

Consolidation both reduces the total number of people working in agriculture and ensures that the largest agribusinesses increasingly dominate the sector. As a result, when people like Vilsack implement policies that benefit “the agriculture sector,” they’re really implementing policies that benefit a tiny minority of wealthy Americans.

“[Agriculture policy] has become more and more separated from the realities of the majority of American people, and the issues that are relevant to American people,” Secchi says. “And so I would say it’s become a much bigger problem, because the rent-seeking industry has become much more potent, and much less representative of social values and interests.”

The Bottom Line

There’s no clear solution to the revolving door problem. Sure, lawmakers could pass laws to crack down on it — but lawmakers are among those who benefit from revolving door politics, so why would they? It’s not a surprise that legislative efforts to close the revolving door have all gone absolutely nowhere.

“I think it’s a real problem for this country that there is this bipartisan support for an obviously rent-seeking minority, very wealthy and very well connected, and through things like the revolving door door process, very capable of influencing the public decision making process,” Secchi says. “Big Ag now represents the interests of a very, very, very small minority of people, and causes a lot of problems for the rest of us.”


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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