A Baltimore Sun piece asks Who's accountable for E. coli?,and suggests "a modern, integrated food safety system for the United States"needs to be put in place by Congress.
How about this: stop turning over all jobs in food handling and harvesting to people who don't understand sanitation. People who likely have less than a sixth-grade education.
How is that you yourself know about the Germ Theory of disease? Because you learned about it in health class in school, or your parents told you. Mexican immigrants didn't have those classes, or those parents. How would they know?
According to the Monterey County Herald , and other news sources, one of the possible mechanisms for the latest E. Coli transmission is "worker hygiene."
Bad worker hygiene in agriculture is caused by mass immigration's effect on the labor force. N.B. Nothing about this situation would be improved by legalization or guest worker programs.
"In a pattern that one academic calls "ethnic replacement," succeeding waves of ever poorer, more marginal Mexicans, many of them from indigenous communities where Spanish is a foreign language, increasingly constitute the field labor force. The downward-spiraling Mexican economy feverishly churns those waves to the degree that, at any moment, as many as 20 percent of California's agricultural workers have been in the U.S. for less than a year." The neocon open border cheerleaders contend that these newcomers will "assimilate" into American culture. Real Soon Now. Yet, these Mixtec-speaking Indians who increasingly make up California's farm workers haven't even assimilated into Hispanic culture in the 484 years since the Spaniards conquered Mexico.
There are two obvious things that would make the food industry more sanitary: English speaking, American-educated employees, and machine picking. These would reduce the other social costs associated with immigrant farm labor, too.