BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 21.9% saturation with 211 hits. Analysis detected 1,450 faulty-reasoning hits from 964 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 39.8% and a BS Rank of 30% (15,418 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 70.40% of the article peer group.
The lunch rush was on.
The Taco Bell wasn’t hopping, exactly, but nor was it deserted.
A steady stream of fearless eaters came and went, along with a march of delivery drivers.
Ryan and Joel weren’t afraid, they told me.
They had good reason not to be.
They didn’t come to Taco Bell for the food, parasite or no parasite.
They were robust young men, in their 20s, and anyway, “We just get a drink order—Baja Blast only,” Joel said.
“So no, not worried.”
In fact, they were giddy, leaving the store with two large cups of the teal beverage.
Others, though, were definitely going all the way.
The cyclosporiasis outbreak in America is bad and every day getting worse.
On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added more than 2,500 cases of Cyclospora infections nationwide, bumping the total to 4,173 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases.
By Wednesday, Michigan health officials were reporting more than 7,000 cases in their state alone.
At the same time, Food and Drug Administration officials announced that the agency was investigating a new outbreak and five total clusters.
Already, hundreds of Americans have been hospitalized by stomach cramps and “explosive diarrhea,” and that number, too, is climbing.
Little is known for sure, so far, about where it is coming from.
The parasite is proving maddeningly difficult to trace.
But one thing we do know is that it is showing up in shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell.
According to Reuters, foot traffic to the fast-food chain was down 29.8 percent last Saturday, compared with the average Saturday traffic in 2026.
But 29.8 percent is not 100 percent, which means that there were still many brave souls willing to risk gastrointestinal ruin for a bite of chalupa or Crunchwrap Supreme.
What sort of person has the appetite for risk as large as their appetite for Taco Bell?
I had to find out.
Felipe, a teenage boy, came in with his mother on Wednesday afternoon.
He ordered a grilled cheese burrito and a plate of nachos.
“No fear,” he told me.
“Why?”
I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“It was just every hour and a half going to the washroom,” said Chicago man Alonso Zaragoza to the local NBC affiliate after his condition got so bad he was forced to go to the emergency room.
“I don’t think I slept more than an hour and a half continuously in the last week.”
The culprit, sure enough: “I looked through everything, there was nothing that I ate that contained lettuce except for chalupa from the luxe box at Taco Bell,” he said.
Diana, in her 20s, told me she herself had just ordered a classic Luxe Box.
Hers consisted of a beefy five-layer burrito, a crunchy taco, cinnamon twists, and a medium drink.
So loyal was she to Taco Bell that she had continued to use the app, racking up rewards points, even in times like these.
What made her so willing to tempt fate with a potential case of explosive diarrhea?
“I didn’t eat the lettuce,” she said.
In fact, this was a solution that Taco Bell was now embracing formally: The company just announced a $1 lettuce-free promotion to tide over the crisis.
This wasn’t just youthful bravado.
Marta and her husband, both gray-haired retirees, came down for lunch.
She had ordered a combo meal too: “Rice, beans, chicken, two tacos, everything,” she told me.
And she hadn’t even eaten around the shredded salad.
“Not worried,” she told me.
“I kept the receipt here, in my bag,” she said, producing it.
“I spent $21.
If I feel bad, I’ll return tomorrow with the police.”
Conveniently enough, there was a uniformed traffic cop named Lifton already on the scene, seated in the window as well, enjoying his lunch.
His order: “Spicy potato tacos with cheese,” he said.
Why aren’t you afraid of cyclosporiasis, I asked.
“I heard about that, but I don’t know,” he said.
“I don’t know.”
A man named Mark sat in the opposite window, also eating lunch.
But upon inspection, he was having clam chowder, which is not a menu item sold at Taco Bell.
It can be hard to stay away.
Analysts at RBC Capital, an investment bank, issued guidance Wednesday indicating that the Cyclospora outbreak was, in fact, an opportunity to buy the company’s stock, which had declined.
“At some point we think this could create a potential opportunity for investors in YUM,” it reads.
YUM!
Brands is the parent company of Taco Bell.
But a few minutes later, he strode through the doors of the Taco Bell, placed an order, and took the food to go.
I asked him what his order was.
He refused to tell me, but he definitely wasn’t afraid either.
I went to the self-service kiosk and ordered myself a chalupa.
By now it was happy hour, which meant I could get a pump of vanilla syrup in my Baja Blast—could make it “dirty,” per the official parlance—for just $2.
So I did that too.
I unwrapped my chalupa, and there it was, the infamous, ruinous shredded lettuce.
According to a statement issued by the company, Taco Bell has “completed removal of affected Taylor Farms lettuce from our restaurants,” though there remains some confusion as to where exactly the illness is coming from.
In fact, there was more lettuce than I had hoped to see.
It was Abraham Lincoln who said, “If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.”
I ate the chalupa and joined the ranks of my fellow, fearless Americans.
At the time of writing, I feel fine.
But it can take seven days to develop symptoms.
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100%flagged-word coverageTaco Bell
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