Wash Fruits & Veggies!
- Mark Dworkin
- Sep 3, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Jan 13
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has just released its annual Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce, a.k.a. Dirty Dozen Produce List as it has since 2004 - and it makes a strong case for washing your produce well.
The nonprofit organization, which ranks produce for pesticide content, uses data from the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to account for contamination. It has found that 75% of all conventional fresh produce sampled had residues of potentially harmful pesticides. But for the items on the Dirty Dozen, a whopping 95% of samples contain pesticides. Such pesticides are known to be health threats.
The FDA and USDA analyzed 47,510 samples of 46 fruits and vegetables, finding that all of them tested positive for trace amounts of 254 pesticides - 209 of which were on the Dirty Dozen produce list.
“We find that what ends up on the list reflects how those fruits and vegetables are grown,” EWG Senior Toxicologist Alexis Temkin told CNN News. “Avocados, for example, aren’t pesticide intensive, while strawberries grow very close to the ground and have a lot of pests.”
Here’s the complete Dirty Dozen list:
Strawberries
Spinach
Kale, collard, and mustard greens
Grapes
Peaches
Pears
Nectarines
Apples
Bell and Hot Peppers
10. Cherries
11. Blueberries
12. Green Beans
On the flip side, it’s not all bad news. EWG also releases an annual Clean Fifteen List, which ranks fruits and vegetables with very low or no pesticide residues. In fact, nearly 65% of the sampled produce in this year’s roster “had no detectable pesticide residues.”
Here’s the complete Clean Fifteen List:
Avocados
Sweet corn
Pineapple
Onions
Papaya
Sweet peas (frozen)
Asparagus
Honeydew Melons
Kiwi
Cabbages
Watermelon
Mushrooms
Mangoes
Sweet potatoes
Carrots
There is an easy lesson to be learned by all this information: wash all of your fruits and vegetables; wash some of them more than others. Wash off the pesticides.
It’s really a no-brainer solution to a complicated problem. Let’s face it, who wants to get sick because they didn’t wash their produce?
