Here is an example of how it happens, Manic:
A guy works on the line sorting out bad (diseased, necrotic, wilted) spinach on a conveyor belt as it goes past him. He gets to work at 6 a.m.. He didn't shower, because he got hammered the night before and barely made it to work. He's sorting spinach all morning with his hands (wearing gloves of course. At 7:30 his break finally comes. He goes and takes a huge dump. A "porcelin buster". He doesn't wash his hands and puts his gloves back on, contaminating the outside of them when he picks them up. He goes back to work sorting spinach. He contaminates every piece that he touches.
1) Every piece of equipment downstream from him is packaging the spinach. There is a rinser that blasts the contaminated spinach with water. It sprays on spinach he didn't touch (purpose is to knock off visible soil, not disinfect)
2) The chopper chops the contaminated spinach and every amount of spinach after the contaminated pieces are exposed to its now contaminated blades.
2) The bag filler handles all the spinach in the run, thus, every leaf of spinach following the contaminated spinach has the oportunity to come into contact with it.
3) All the while, the conveyor belt runs in a continuous loop, picking up e. coli and exposing any fresh spinach to the pathogen.
4) If the spinach is flumed to the bagger, all that water and contact surface are contaminated and counts of e. coli build over time.
5) Pathogens continue to grow within the bag of spinach (a moist sealed environment ideal for pathogen growth)
This all continues until the end of the shift when cleaning practices are done.
