Let's see now --- while everyone looks the other way, large agricultural farms hire illegal immigrant labor for $5 an hour. And since they are illegal, they are paid in cash and always less than $600 per job as "labor consultants" with no 1099 required. (The real money goes to "labor contractors" who go south of the border to arrange for coyotes and safe houses and transportation.)

Now, when you pay someone $5 an hour, you provide a cold water outdoor shower, a cold water spigot, and no other benefits. Tents and sleeping bags are pitched in field margins grossly contaminated with chemical insecticides, pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers. Since these people are sub-human, no toilets are provided (every farmer knows that Mexicans are more comfortable with fewer amenities) and no hand-washing facilities (which would require warm water and soap.) Workers defecate in the margins of the fields where rain washes feces into the rows of growing produce.

These large farms claim that 1) not enough labor is locally available for intensive harvesting operations, 2) that state schooling requirements have largely eliminated American migrant labor, and 3) that these are jobs that the neediest American will not do. And they're right on every count. These farms also oppose any guest worker program because they would have to pay the going wages, would have to provide health, sanitation, and shelter basics, would have to follow most state and federal labor laws, and would have to pay workmens' comp, and would have to pay the medicare and social security contributions directly to either the worker or the federal government (depending on whose proposal you look at.) But strangely enough, if they provided those basics, local labor would become much more available and people would take the majority of the jobs, especially in these recession times.

This is a double failure --- the underfunded, understaffed, politically-controlled, physician-dominated FDA and the lack of tenable immigration reform.

But people want cheap food. And agricultural co-ops and mega-farms want 40+% profits (unlike family farmers who are in more like the 8% range in a good year and negative numbers in a bad year.) So you are going to get e.coli for the simple reason that sanitation is just part of a larger and much more complex process.

The FDA checks our food for safety and our food is contaminated. The EPA gave it permission to BP to spray tons of toxic chemicals on the oil. Why don't I feel save & protected by these government agencies.

Chris-Good explanation.

I recently read a story in the International Herald Tribune on how Mexican crops are watered and fertilized from sewer run-off from Mexico City. With that vision in mind I can only imagine what farm workers do to the crops in our fields.

Arizona, I wonder which Illegal Alien tried to poison people in the U.S.! Its all some dark plan by our "SHADOW GOVERNMENT", poison the peoples food, they will beg for protection! FEAR!!!