If you’re eating non-organic celery today, you may be ingesting 67 pesticides with it, according to a new report from the Environmental Working Group.
The group, a nonprofit focused on public health, scoured nearly 100,000 produce pesticide reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to determine what fruits and vegetables we eat have the highest, and lowest, amounts of chemical residue.
Most alarming are the fruits and vegetables dubbed the “Dirty Dozen,” which contain 47 to 67 pesticides per serving. These foods are believed to be most susceptible because they have soft skin that tends to absorb more pesticides.
Celery
Peaches
Strawberries
Apples
Domestic blueberries
Nectarines
Sweet bell peppers
Spinach, kale and collard greens
Cherries
Potatoes
Imported grapes
Lettuce
With the exception of potatoes and imported grapes, I eat a lot of those foods rather regularly.
And this may be the smartest thing I have heard anyone say in the news ever: “Pesticides are designed to kill things. Why wait for 20 years to discover they are bad for us?” Rosenthal said.
James in WA
John, do you have a link for the original story?
Southern Beale
Well I guess I can feel slightly better about my exorbitant Whole Foods grocery bills.
If it’s not organic, I don’t buy it. End of story.
Chyron HR
At last Balloon Juice reveals its true colors as a hotbed of… ANTI-PESTICITISM!
MTmofo
Well, you made it two and a half hours. Baby steps. :)
AhabTRuler
Well, I eat a shitton of potatoes, but I haven’t had a agribusiness potato in more than a year.
Violet
@James in WA:
Here’s a link to a WaPo story on it.
I just can’t do organic peppers. They’re so hard to find and ridiculously expensive. I do try to get organic soft fruit and I grow a lot of my own vegetables, especially greens. The difference in taste between conventional and organic with greens is amazing, even if the organic are store bought.
Fred Fnord
Is this you exploding into a ball of incoherent rage and angst?
Just asking.
fred
James in WA
@Violet: Thanks, Violet. It looks like John was doing some editing and added the link as well.
I buy what I don’t grow myself through a local CSA and spend a good bit of time canning so that I can justify eating out-of-season foods. The only justification I had to start doing this initially was my DFH proclivity towards thinking that big agribusiness is a Bad Thing and that shipping food hundreds or thousands of miles is ridiculous, so it’s always nice find a story like this one.
Martin
Let me be the first to welcome our Hedorah overlords.
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
Suicide by strawberry. Yum.
sherifffruitfly
Whatever. Millions upon millions of people eat that zomgitzpoisonuzz!!! celery. Over the course of decades. And yet somehow life expectancy keeps increasing.
People trying to scare me into paying 4x as much for my food are just fail.
James in WA
@sherifffruitfly:
Which is probably largely due to advances in medical technology. Increasing lifespans do not imply reduced disease rates.
MattR
@sherifffruitfly:
And of course you never consider the possibility that life expectancy could be increasing even more if we did not keep undoing the advances in medical knowledge and technology by ingesting these pesticides and other toxic chemicals.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Yeah? Well, arugula is covered with elitism!
Anne Laurie
Seems like a good place to ask the experienced gardeners here: Is there some kind of loose cover I could use to grow mesclun in a planter without it being invaded by 10,000 weed-seed ‘volunteers’? I like the idea of cut-and-come-again pesticide-free lettuce, but I’m not experienced enough to reliably tell edible seedlings from the chickweed/oxalis/dandelion/etc sprouts that pop up in all my planters. I know there are supposed to be fabrics that permit light & water to enter a planter while keeping weeds & insects out, but I don’t know enough to evaluate them…
Larkspur
I feel so lucky. I don’t have much money, but I have a number of grocery stores in my area that have a good selection of fresh organic produce, so I can make that choice. Once again, though, poor people in cities without reliable transportation have a hard time even getting dirty fresh produce.
Please enjoy a delicious cold beverage for me, JC, and do not let your head get explodey.
Citizen Alan
I just shrug at stories like this now. There is no way organic farming can feed everyone in America, and there is no way to fix the problems with Big Ag without cutting into Monsanto’s profits, and there is no force in Heaven or on Earth that is going to cut into Monsanto’s bottom line. Until someone comes up with a solution for the fundamental problem of our entire civilization being dependent on inherently greedy corporations, everything else is just putting a band-aid on the problem.
QuaintIrene
Shit. Time to expand the garden.
ChrisS
Dandelions are a healthy green, too.
numbskull
@Citizen Alan: Oh good, then you won’t be buying organic foods. More for me! Thanks!
Steeplejack
@Fred Fnord:
Thanks for dropping the unattended hyphen on your sig line. WordPress (at least as implemented here) no likey.
Steeplejack
@James in WA:
Or better level of overall health while alive.
salvage
Meh, I eat tons of non-organic fresh fruit and vegetables and all I know for sure is that my health has improved overall dramatically from my days of eating packaged crap. I’m sick less often and when I am ill it’s usually pretty quick and minor.
If forty years from now the resulting chemical soup in my body coagulates into cancer or whatever I’ll still think I’m ahead on the deal.
At any rate the pesticides, chemical fertilizer and genetic seed tampering aren’t going anywhere because we’d probably have food riots without them so it’d be best to expose yourself to enough to develop resistance.
WereBear
G’hed. Eat what you want. You might not be able to tell the difference in taste, and you don’t think taste is worth more.
I can, and I do.
Alien-Radio
@Southern Beale:
just because it says organic doesn’t mean it’s pesticide free, just that the pesticides are natural. with the increasing demand for organic produce want pesticide free? grow your own/go Permaculture.
Robert Sneddon
A quick Gizoozle for “organic pesticides” reveals the sort of pesticides organic farmers and growers use in place of rigorously tested and FDA-regulated “artificial” chemicals, stuff like nicotine (supposedly illegal) or rotenone (kills fish, linked to Parkinson’s Disease and nerve damage in mammals).
Just because it says “organic” on the label doesn’t mean it’s not been treated with toxic chemicals.
Ming
According to a new study by the Leopold Center, the Midwest could grow all the fruits and veggies it needs in the farm land equivalent to 1 Iowa county, at the same time creating 9300 jobs and $395mil in labor income. Conventional soy/corn farming on the same land: 2500 jobs/$59mil in labor income.
linky here
But yeah — a big part of the problem is that Monsanto ran Ag policy under the Repubs, and remains a huge force under the Dems. We the people can continue to let the big corporations run the nation, or we can get involved.
Proportion Wheel
No question that veggies fertilized with composted horse manure taste better than veggies fertilized with “chemical” fertilizer. And no question that it’s desirable to minimize your pesticide consumption.
But converting to all-organic agriculture is not in the cards unless human population is drastically reduced and land and human labor devoted to farming are drastically increased.
The best realistic solution is increased government study and regulation of pesticides. Many synthetic pesticides have been specifically engineered to be less dangerous to human health than the rotenone/pyrethrin mixture commonly used by organic farmers because it is “natural.” Well, nature offers up a lot of poisons, and “natural” is no assurance of low human toxicity.
Further, the “67 pesticides” in every serving thing is stupid. What farmer, or even evil agribiz conglomerate (and the are evil, in my book) would spread 67 pesticides on any crop? That makes no economic sense (the only sense those people care about).
We should not forget that it wasn’t that long ago that people even in the US, even well above poverty level, often could not acquire foods offering adequate nutrition, and that industrial-scale agriculture, including pesticides, ended that problem.
Ditch Digger
I’m not following how potatoes could be up there, i can see the others being susceptible with the soft skin, but we eat the tuber that is just below the surface, not the exposed plant that would be sprayable. I assume anything non-organic nowadays would be subject to some type of spraying, but its eye opening that potatoes would be one of the most heavily done.
Fred Fnord
@Steeplejack:
Is it just ‘no likey’ as in ‘it crosses out my name’ or does it have some other effect on other browsers?
I noticed the former some time ago, but I have been signing my name ‘-fred’ for so long that my fingers do it automatically whether I want them to or not. And anyway, I’ve been feeling cross lately, so it seems somehow appropriate.
If it is actually having some other effect, then let me know and I’ll make more of an effort to stop. Or, if that proves mentally impractical, I’ll just stop commenting here. It’s not like anyone but me would notice.
—fred
kid bitzer
it would be really nice to get the pesticides out of the produce we eat.
until then, you can eat fresh produce or not. if you eat it, wash it.
i seem to recall credible people who write on these issues (i.e. not me), saying that the benefits of eating washed fresh produce still outweigh the harm of ingesting pesticides.
‘course, we don’t know all the facts on either part of that equation–we don’t know how beneficial fresh produce is, or how harmful the pesticides are.
and if you can do organic, then you can shift the balance towards good.
but i would hate to see anyone eat less fresh produce because of this. there’s a bunch of good food in it.
Brain Hertz
After a bit of digging, this looks like mostly bullshit to me.
As an aside, contrary to what is kind of implied by the article, this is not actually research conducted by the Environmental Working Group (but you have to dig a little to find it). It’s research conducted by the FDA, which is published on a regular basis and available on their website. This is the report they’re looking at:
http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/getfile?dDocName=STELPRDC5081750
the first flag for me is that they’re talking about how many pesticides were detected. Why would it be relevant how many different pesticides were detected, rather than what the quantities were?
Secondly, the CNN article says that these items contain so many “pesticides per serving”. I have no idea WTF that is actually supposed to mean, but it isn’t supported by the data. The total number of detections reported (it’s on page 23 of the FDA report) is across the entire sample, not for a single item.
For example, in the case of celery, they tested 741 samples of celery for 160 different kinds of pesticides, for a total of over 118,000 tests. That’s just for celery. Of those, there were just under 4000 positives (about 3.2 percent) with 54 different types of pesticied across the whole data set. So there weren’t “54 per serving”. In fact, there were no detections at all in the majority of cases (given the sensitivity of the detection process, that’s actually pretty remarkable):
Then you need to look at how much they actually detected. The numbers are tiny. For instance, again taking celery as an example, the test for acetamiprid (see appendix B, page 1) showed a range of detection of .001 to 0.068 parts per million, versus an FDA approved limit of 3.0 parts per million. That’s not actually very much.
Given how sensitive the testing is, it’s hardly surprising that you can find stuff. We’re talking about parts per billion numbers in the cases that I can see.
Allison W.
@Ditch Digger:
Pesticides can and will reach places that were never intended to be sprayed. It can certainly seep into the ground.
someguy
Yep.
Shop at right wing corporate whore Whole Foods and live for fucking ever.
someguy
proportion wheel / brain hertz = Trolly McTrollpants.
Brain Hertz
Because? Facts are facts, you know? And there’s a whole lot of misstatement and exaggeration in the article.
As in “which contain 47 to 67 pesticides per serving”. Not, you know, actually true.
fucen tarmal
all this food stuff is just designed to confuse the fuck out of people, so what do they do….ICE CREAM!!!!!!!
and they go back to eating the same shit as before….personally, i found it hard to eat out of a whole foods, or its equivalents, i just want some grub, i don’t want to join a cult, so finding reasonable stuff i knew what to do with , was a chore. grocery shopping to me is like an hour of making small talk in the lobby of a palin tour stop, i just want it over with….
its like the carlin bit, the fda today determined that saliva causes cancer, but only in small quantities over a number of years.
Steeplejack
@Fred Fnord:
Let me be blunt: it is fucking up the thread after your comment. As in killing it. Take a look at the bottom of this thread, for example:
https://balloon-juice.com/2010/05/26/smedley-butler-rides-again/
After your comment there are no more comments, and the formatting of the “sidebars” is fucked up.
It happens because you use a single hyphen before your sig. (Your comment at #7 didn’t do it because Anne Laurie went back in and fixed it. And your comment at #30 is okay because you apparently put in an em-dash.)
Nobody is objecting on purely aesthetic grounds or telling you to get lost. We’re just trying to get you to make a (seemingly) small change to accommodate WordPress’s admittedly fucked-up processing.
scav
@Steeplejack: Some browsers hide the problem, so he actually may not be able to see it. I never saw the thread I managed to thoroughly trash on that first grand day. Trust us though, FFnrord, it’s there. Think of it as a little autoformatting gift from WordPress, kinda like those things you always have to spend hours turning off in Word.
scav
@Allison W.: Chemicals, water soluble, sink into soil, roots, designed to suck up water, do so, hmmm . . . yeah, that’s a toughy.
Steeplejack
@scav:
Point taken. But I looked at threads that got “fnorded” in Opera, Firefox and IE, and they all looked the same.
I can’t remember your transgression. You’re not the Master of Accountancy, are you? I thought that was J. Michael Neal.
Jeez, talk about needing a scorecard to recognize the players.
Steaming Pile
Potatoes are about the easiest things to grow in the back yard, and you haven’t lived until you’ve had fresh ones, right out of the ground. I think if I lived in an apartment in the city, I’d have a big-ass pot on the balcony with a potato plant growing in it. Mmmmmmmm.
Steaming Pile
@salvage: Or at least wash your veggies. I consider myself fortunate that I have a whole acre on which to grow whatever gives me pleasure (and will grow in the Northeast) and no HOA to tell me I can’t. If you’re in the neighborhood in August or early September, you’ll probably leave with a big bag of homegrown tomatoes (green ones, so they survive the trip home, but they’re still delicious).
To me, gardening season makes tolerating lake effect snow worth it.
scav
@Steeplejack: nah, I managed to massively break a thread by trying to explain how to fix it using html codes. It was the classic day where every thread got worse and worse and worse — the day John first tried to roll out the new commenting system. Epic. And I couldn’t see a thing except, finally, the indenting problems. (Chrome).
Joel
Researchers use rotenone – an organic pesticide – for parkinson’s research. It does a pretty good job at destroying the substantial nigra. Before anyone freaks, however, it’s highly photodegradable and shouldn’t appear in food even in trace amounts. Conventional stuff is considerably more durable and therefore more effective. Even that stuff is trace, but why risk it? Produce is such a marginal expense that the extra $10 a week is worth the peace (and piece) of mind.
HT
Come on, people, how credulous can you be? “At least 47 pesticides per serving?!” Do you honestly think any farmer sprays his fields with 47 different types of pesticide? What does that even mean? Does it mean 47 active ingredients? 47 potentially toxic substances? Do they differentiate between added and naturally-occurring substances?
And as someone else already mentioned, there is no mention of quantity, which is a glaring omission. If you live in a city, you’re inhaling worse substances with every breath.
Cricket
Here’s a fun fact about celery: insect herbivory causes an increase in naturally occurring compounds called psoralens. Psoralens are known to cause damage to the DNA of animals that ingest them. Your organic celery is likely to have more exposure to insect herbivory and a higher concentration of psoralens.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Steeplejack
@scav:
Oh, yeah, I remember that now. Good times. And please step away from the HTML-mo-tron.
James in WA
@salvage:
Processed/packaged foods are pretty nasty, when you get right down to it. Your health would most likely improve if you were a glue-huffing perennial abuser of wood alcohol who dropped those habits in favor of pint-a-day vodka routine, too, but that’s really not saying much about the health aspects of the latter.
Derek
Everything is poisonous. It’s just a matter of degree, without a mention of quantities and the relation to the human bodies tolerance to the particular substances this article is meaningless.
chopper
just had fresh strawberries from the garden. pesticide my ass.
kormgar
Not to be a killjoy, but a simple listing of pesticide-like compounds found on the produce is, in and of itself, meaningless. What matters is not whether or not a particular molecule (or analogue) can be detected, but the actual concentration of that molecule. Unfortunately, there did not appear to be any relevant data on that study.
Here’s the thing. Many certified organic farms use a number of organic pesticides that can be dangerous if ingested in significant doses. Industrial farms tend to use synthetic pesticides, many of which, again, can be dangerous if ingested in quantity. For their part, most species of plants will produce a number of amazingly toxic and carcinogenic compounds in response to insect stress.
Ultimately it is all a question of picking your poison. Me, I’ll choose local artisan farming over the alternatives when available. But that just doesn’t scale up particularly well.
tkogrumpy
If it’s not organic, I don’t grow it. Not since 1952.
SixStringSlingr
HA! I don’t eat vegetables therefore I will live forever!
Me and Al Michaels will bury all of you bastards!
Brain Hertz
kormgar,
the original data is in the FDA report they’re quoting from, which I linked to earlier. But apparently I’m a troll…
By the way, guys, if you think that going organic is going to help, you’re kidding yourselves. When you’ve finished reading the FDA’s data, you might also want to check out the EPA’s limits on pesticides in drinking water. Like, say, here:
http://www.epa.gov/safewater/contaminants/index.html
if you don’t want to trawl through the data, I’ll summarize:
Organic food: might taste better, but probably not going to help with your pesticide ingestion much. They’re in the fucking water coming out of your faucet. Possible solutions: drink beer. Preferably imported.
Compare, for instance the data for 2,4-D (2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic Acid).
Measured in food by the FDA: range between .020 and .200 parts per million in the 1% of samples in which it was detected.
Specified maximum level in drinking water by the EPA: .07 parts per million.
Noted that the water supply numbers are specified limits, not measured water quality numbers. If you want actual quality reports, google “water quality report” and you’ll find a bunch. I looked at numbers for 2,4-D (I just picked that one at random because it shows up on all of the documents, so it’s easy to cross-reference). So far, all of the reports I looked at reported levels well below limits.
Significantly though, this particular randomly selected pesticide shows up as detected at some level in every single water quality report I have looked at so far.
Go read the whole EPA list. There’s a lot of stuff there, besides just pesticides. In fact, pesticides are the least of it.
jerry 101
I’ve noticed recently that its impossible (seemingly) to find organic potatoes or grapes at the grocery. I know that the farmer’s markets should have some organic potatoes soon enough (well, I hope), but when will grapes appear? When they finally quit importing them from Chile and start bringing in California grapes?
I’ve also been trying to give up eating out of season produce shipped from huge distances (or at least minimize it) by sticking to stuff grown in the USA, or at least on the North American continent. Easier said than done. You can find stuff, but selection becomes rather thin. But the thin selection has gotten me to try some new things – lots of greens that I had never bought before, for starters.
But the lack of tomatoes is depressing – are canadian hydroponic organic tomatoes ok?
ChrisZ
Organic farmers use pesticides too, they just have to be derived from plant or animal waste. I’d love to see how many pesticides are on the organic food people eat. I’d also love to see any actual evidence that the pesticides on the foods mentioned are actually harmful to people in the doses they are found in.
Anne Laurie
@Ditch Digger:
When we bought a house located on not one but two Superfund sites, I did some reading about “contaminant take-up”. The general rule is that a plant’s roots — or tubers like potatoes — are the most affected by whatever’s in the soil, good or bad. Fruits ‘take up’ the least, followed by leaves, then stems (like celery). So I’m assuming that celery is the list loser (most contaminated) because it absorbs some pesticides as they’re sprayed on the crop, and more from the soil they’re grown in.
P.S. This is one reason all our tomatoes are grown in planters, with dirt brought from elsewhere.
James in WA
@jerry 101:
Field-grown new potatoes are at least a month away, and probably more like two, at least in my part of the country. Maybe sooner down south.
If you’re fortunate enough to live in an area with a food co-op, they’re usually pretty receptive to suggestions about what to buy and when, at least from their members. In that case, you don’t have to rely upon what “they” decide to stock, since you’re an owner-member yourself, and you can help decide what is on the shelves. If you’re not fortunate to have one nearby — help start one!
Good for you! Trying to eat in season, or locally, or both, is hard.
There are many greens that are not only tasty but also nutritious that commercial growers won’t sell, for a variety of reasons. Stinging nettles, orach, and lamb’s quarters are three that come to mind right away. All three are weeds, which means that you can forage them easily and also that they are easy to grow. (So easy, in fact, that they are hard to obliterate if you let them go to seed.)
If it’s being shipped any real distance at all (like, more than a few miles), it’s probably a tough-skinned F1 hybrid, purposely bred to look and ship well at the expense of flavor and texture. Do yourself a favor and try some local heirlooms — you will never go back to those flavorless pale red balls of styrofoam that they sell in supermarkets.
Once you find a good source of heirlooms locally, buy them by the pound when they’re in season, and then can them whole. With a little forethought, you can easily eat locally in much of the USA, and year-round at that. I don’t know (but I would bet) that pretty much every american city over a few tens of thousand of population has at least one farmer who raises and sells heirloom tomatoes. It’s like trying to find a Yankees or Red Sox fan — I don’t care how small the city is, there’s got to be at least one of each in there, somewhere.
ChrisS
@Anne Laurie:
Jesus Christ … On two Superfund sites?! Or just near/downgradient?
Typically, anything that undergoes remediation is going to have a deed restriction tacked on (commercial/industrial use only) along with quarterly/annual groundwater monitoring.
No thanks. I’m already spending 80 hours a week this summer on an old manufactured gas plant while we dig out the remains of coal tar waste and #6 fuel oil (hoocoodanode?) that’s been seeping into the river for the last 70 years. This isn’t their site, but BTW, fuck BP.
someguy
As soon as grapes start ripening mid-winter in the Northern hemisphere, they’ll get right on it. Until then, you’re probably getting your grapes from Chile until at least September.
Don
HealthCastle broke out which foods to make sure you buy organic and which ones it’s less important to get organic. There was also a nice all-on-one-page version but I can’t find it at the moment.
I find it easier to just remember what I can buy at the market with less concern. From the link above, the foods you have less to worry about getting pesticide exposure from:
* Fruit: pineapple, mango, kiwi, banana, mango, papaya, blueberries, watermelon
* Vegetables: onions, avocado, sweet corn, sweet peas, asparagus, cabbage, broccoli, eggplant
Derek
@Fred Fnord:
FYI you don’t have to sign your name at all, we can see that the comment is from “Fred Fnord.”
Derek
@Derek:
Hey, I’m Derek! Not you!