Pesticides Are In Our Produce – Get Educated About What You Eat

Some of the are open again, and CSAs are going to be starting up again soon as well.

That has me thinking about all of the delicious summer fruits and veggies that we will be bringing home!

Also, because I’m slightly paranoid and read way too many scare-tactic reports on the Internet, I am thinking about the toxins that we’re unwittingly putting into our systems each time we digest yummy produce throughout the year.

Let’s not even talk about (also in our food in addition to our consumer products!).  Let’s just quietly freak out about pesticides, shall we?

Environmental Working Group (EWG) has published a report that serves as a “shopper’s guide to pesticides.”  The guide lists the “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean 15” foods that we should know about.

Remember the e. coli in spinach scare of 2006?  In the end they found that the spinach was contaminated from the inside out: irrigation water had become contaminated and that had watered the veggies, so no amount of washing would have helped.

The produce on EWG’s dirty list is much the same.

These particular fruits and vegetables can’t be rid of their pesticides by simply being washed or peeled.  It certainly helps to do so, but it will probably not eliminate pesticides that reside on the inside of this produce.  Many are too porous or too contaminated. 

The guide notes that “EWG research has found that people who eat five fruits and vegetables a day from the Dirty Dozen list consume an average of 10 pesticides a day. Those who eat from the 15 least contaminated conventionally-grown fruits and vegetables ingest fewer than 2 pesticides daily.”

Should you really care about how many pesticides you ingest?

The EPA and various other scientists who know about these things seem to think so.

“Health effects of pesticides may be acute or delayed in those who are exposed,” according to the EPA’s Pesticides: Health and Safety. National Assessment of the Worker Protection Workshop #3.  A 2007 published report on Wikipedia found that "most studies on non-Hodgkin lymphoma and leukemia showed positive associations with pesticide exposure and thus concluded that cosmetic use of pesticides should be decreased.”

“Strong evidence also exists for other negative outcomes from pesticide exposure including neurological, birth defects, fetal death and neurodevelopmental disorder,” also notes Wikipedia.

According to The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, 10 out of the 12 most dangerous chemicals are pesticides.

The following comes directly from the EWG’s guide.

Dirty Dozen:  The Worst for Pesticides

Celery

Peaches

Strawberries

Apples

Blueberries

Nectarines

Bell Peppers

Spinach

Cherries

Kale/Collard

Greens

Potatoes

Grapes (Imported)

Clean 15:  The Lowest In Pesticides

Onions

Avocado

Sweet Corn

Pineapple

Mangos

Sweet Peas

Asparagus

Kiwi

Cabbage

Eggplant

Cantaloupe

Watermelon

Grapefruit

Sweet Potato

Honeydew

According to EWG, their “analysts have developed the Guide based on data from nearly 89,000 tests for pesticide residues in produce conducted between 2000 and 2008 and collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration." You can find a detailed description of the criteria EWG used here.