If there’s one fruit to be wary of its conventional strawberries, says the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which put the fruit at the top of its annual “Dirty Dozen” ranking. This year’s list measured pesticide contamination on 48 types of produce, finding more than 146 types of pesticide, even after washing and, where necessary, peeling.
Apples have held the group’s notorious prize for the last five years, but this time around “forty percent [of strawberries] had residues of 10 or more pesticides and some had residues of 17 different pesticides. Some of the chemicals detected on strawberries are relatively benign, but others are linked to cancer, reproductive and developmental damage, hormone disruption and neurological problems,” said EWG.
In California, where the majority of U.S. strawberries are grown, farmers routinely spray 300 pounds of pesticides per acre. And most of those chemicals are in the form of fumigants, which easily travel through the air to nearby schools and communities. Late last year, FERN and writer Liza Gross reported in The Nation that a disproportionate number of school children in the state affected by pesticides were Latino.
Other serious offenders on the EWG list included peaches and nectarines, while potatoes had more pesticides than any other item sampled by weight. On EWG’s “Clean Fifteen” ranking, avocados won top marks, with less than 1 percent showing any residues.
Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst at EWG, who helped develop the lists based on results of more than 35,200 samples tested by the USDA and the FDA, called the amount of pesticide residue on grocery store produce “shocking.” But it’s even more startling, she said, “that these residues don’t violate the weak U.S. laws and regulations on pesticides in food. The EPA’s levels of residues allowed on produce are too lax to protect Americans’ health.” She advised buying organic wherever possible, since even small amounts of pesticide exposure can be harmful, especially for children.