Your Organic Food Is Treated With Pesticides Too
The Environment Working Group has released its latest list of “dirty dozen” fruits and vegetables suspected of containing pesticides. ( This is a misleading list , as we explained earlier.) You might be tempted to buy organic, as the EWG suggests, but guess what – organic isn’t free of pesticides.
Organic farmers can use pesticides if they choose from a list of approved options . The USDA Organic Program does not prohibit the use of all pesticides , only “synthetic” ones. (By the way, the term “pesticide” includes both insect sprays and weed control agents.)
So what remains on our vegetables? USDA periodically checks products for pesticide residues; it is the Pesticide Data Program . (The EWG will repurpose this data to create its Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists.) But the USDA does not verify the presence of approved organic pesticides. In this way, the EWG reports on materials related to conventional crops without considering what is present on organic crops.
So, can you reduce your exposure to pesticides by going organic? We don’t know, but the answer may well be negative. Even looking at synthetic inorganic pesticides in USDA tests, organic crops don’t always have the lowest amounts. Take strawberries, for example, the dirtiest commodity on the 2018 list: 75 percent of organic strawberries and 76 percent of regular strawberries contained pesticides below 5 percent of the legal limit.
In other words, buying organic strawberries can result in more pesticide residues than buying regular strawberries. We recommend that you completely ignore the Dirty Dozen and buy those fruits and vegetables that suit your diet and your budget.
Update from 4/13/2018 at 4:09 pm to correct a sentence in the penultimate paragraph, which originally stated that “common crops do not always have the lowest quantities.” We meant, of course, organic crops.