Yesterday morning my son, William, woke up and asked if he could have cherries for breakfast. Unfortunately, I had polished off the bag the night before. But, I like to think of myself as a good mom, so after I dropped him off to school, I drove over to the grocery store to pick up a new bag of cherries. Sometimes I get chatty while shopping, and before I knew it, I was in a pretty engaged conversation with a guy who was also looking to buy some cherries. I said aloud that I wished the store carried organic cherries, and as it turned out, he was wishing the same thing. So, we started talking about organically-grown produce and discussing which fruits and veggies we like to buy organic. We must have seemed pretty authoritative on the topic because before long, another shopper drove her cart mysteriously close to us and appeared to be eavesdropping while looking over containers of strawberries. As I was ending the conversation with my new produce friend, whose name I never did catch, the women said, "Excuse me, but should I be buying organic strawberries? Or Carrots?"
First, I told her that buying organic strawberries is a good idea, since they are one of the fruits known to have a high pesticide application. And although carrots fare slightly better, it's usually not much more expensive to buy organic than non-organically grown, so you really can't go wrong. Then, I told her that the Environmental Working Group puts out
list of ranked pesticide contamination for fruits and vegetables. The
methodology for this list analyzed produce contamination after the fruits or veggies had been washed and/or peeled, so, in my opinion, it's a pretty good guide as to how to reduce the amount of pesticides we're consuming.
If you want to look at the list, you can find it
here: http://www.foodnews.org/walletguide.php
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