“Thirty to forty times a day. It stopped, and it started again. It is miserable.”So says Ella-Salone Jones from her Detroit hospital bed.She’s being treated for gastrointestinal complications arising from a parasitic Cyclospora contamination. That nationwide outbreak began in May.Now, hundreds more are stampeding to the thunderbox across the United States because of yet another food poisoning source: Salmonella bacteria.Something stinks about this scenario. Taylor Farms is a major food distributor linked to both outbreaks.And it has declared a “Code Brown” over claims of dirty dealings among its corporate command pool.Taylor Farms Tennessee chief Brian Thure has been accused of slicing some $A45 million from the company’s coffers over the past 14 years, according to claims in a lawsuit brought by the company against him.He is not charged with any wrongdoing.Mr Thure has allegedly confessed to tossing greenbacks towards “gambling and women, none of which were related to any legitimate business purpose”, according to the lawsuit.He is being summoned to account after police allege he was turning the distributor’s cash stash into their own personal buffet. It’s alleged their slush funds paid for a Hawaii mansion, a sprawling California ranch, extensive renovations, and a multitude of personal serving staff.This all went down in April.The food contamination crisis came up in May.Now food chains, including giants Taco Bell and Chipotle, are running for cover after serving Taylor Farms’ iceberg lettuce and jalapeños. And supermarkets like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are urgently recalling guacamole, pico de gallo and taco dip.S**t happensMs Jones spent more than two weeks in hospital after dining out at Taco Bell. “They had to find something that can help me, and they don’t even really know if it’s helping me,” she told local media. Her medical bills quickly piled up. They topped $A140,000.“I had a vacation for my children, and I can’t take them now,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for a year and a half.”It’s a different story for Brian Thure.“Mr Thure continues to expend stolen funds, demonstrating the reckless and irresponsible dissipation of [company] assets,” Taylor Farms alleges in documents issued to a Tennessee Federal Court. They also accuse him in the lawsuit of putting his wife, Julie, her mother and sister-in-law on the company payroll. Together, they reportedly earned $US3 million without having to work.The lawsuit names Julie alsonside Mr Thure as a defendant. Significant amounts have also allegedly been spent on personal staff.“These individuals included Mr Thure’s and Mrs Thure’s personal chef, personal driver, handyman, personal trainer, aquarium maintenance attendant, and an employee of Mrs Thure’s company, Bear Clover Consulting,” the court documents claim.The chef cost $A698,000.The chauffeur $A800,000.The pool cleaner $A540,000.The aquarium keeper $A640,000.The Bear Clover Consulting staffer got $A1.4 million.The $A7.8 million Hawaiian mansion was donated to Middle Tennessee Christian School for fundraising use.And building contractor MTS allegedly received $A17 million after doing about $A567,000 worth of legitimate work on Taylor Farms’ Tennessee operations. The extra work included renovating the ranch in Humboldt, California.The lawsuit alleges states all invoices were paid in instalments of less than $US50,000 ($A70,000) – the point at which Taylor Farms’ accounting systems would flag a transaction.Mr Thure also allegedly left Taylor Fresh Foods CEO Bruce Taylor a voicemail where he “confessed to and apologised for his fraudulent misconduct,” the lawsuit claims.Setting bowels in motion “It was just every hour and a half going to the washroom,” says Alonso Zaragoza of Chicago. “I don’t think I slept more than an hour and a half continuously in the last week.” He’s another cyclosporiasis sufferer.“It hasn’t been a fun experience,” he added. “It’s a little embarrassing, but who hasn’t had diarrhoea in their whole life, you know?”Taylor Farms is a big player. It sits among a handful of salad and vegetable suppliers that supply much of the United States.It delivers billions of servings of salad-based products to customers including Walmart, Target and Kroger, not to mention the massive fast-food chains, each year.It says in a statement that it spends more than $US200 million each year on food safety efforts, which it calls its “biggest area of funding by several orders of magnitude”. The US Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday (Australian time) said it had identified 345 cases of salmonella poisoning – including 36 hospitalisations – over 27 states. These had been tracked to jalapeños sourced by Coast Citrus Distributors from a Mexican grower.It also supplies produce to Taylor Farms.This comes on top of some 6300 cases of Cyclospora contamination in iceberg lettuce linked directly to Taylor Farms’ operations in Mexico.“Considering the company’s well-documented history of recalls and attempts to deflect blame, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they face multiple issues simultaneously,” says US consumer advocate Brian Ronholm. In 2009, it was Salmonella in shredded lettuce. In 2013 it was bagged salad mix. In 2015, it was E. coli in diced celery and onion. In 2024, Taylor Farms was cited as the source of E. coli-contaminated onions distributed to US McDonald’s outlets. It was also linked to dodgy romaine lettuce that same year.“Every time Taylor Farms turns up at the centre of an outbreak, the company says the same thing — this is an isolated event, our branded products are not involved, we acted quickly,” says food safety lawyer Bill Marler. “The two outbreaks … the onions in October 2024 and the romaine in November 2024 — are also the two where the public was never given a recall notice to read. In the first, customers were told, and consumers were not. In the second, nobody was told at all until we filed suit.”Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer