Mark Ruffalo poses for a portrait during the 96th Academy Awards Oscar nominees luncheon on Monday, Feb. 12, 2024, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello) Mark Ruffalo poses for a portrait … more >

Actor Mark Ruffalo said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is to blame for a historic drop in lettuce prices, pointing to Mr. Kennedy rather than the food safety outbreak tied to Mexican-sourced iceberg lettuce that has been rattling the produce market for weeks.

In a Thursday post on BlueSky, Mr. Ruffalo wrote, “Robert F KennedyJR has killed the lettuce market by not getting to the bottom of these outbreaks and playing politics with everything. We can’t trust the CDC or him.”

Lettuce prices fell 16.4% in July, the largest one-month decline on record for the category in the Consumer Price Index, according to federal data released Wednesday. Economists have tied the drop to consumer avoidance of lettuce following a multistate Cyclospora outbreak, not to any HHS policy failure. Even after the plunge, lettuce prices remain up 7.5% from a year earlier.

Federal regulators said their traceback investigation and outbreak data converge on shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico, based in Guanajuato, Mexico. The company voluntarily recalled iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico, and Taylor Farms has disputed the FDA’s conclusion, citing a since-clarified false-positive test result. The scare has also weighed on restaurant chains with no connection to the contaminated product: Chipotle said the outbreak cut into sales by roughly 2 percentage points in the back half of July, while Sweetgreen cut its full-year outlook, citing reduced demand.

Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas and director of its Arkansas Center for Research in Economics, said the price drop reflects consumers simply avoiding the product.

“It’s fallen because nobody wants it,” he said.

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