It’s hard to tell which fruits and vegetables you should buy organic, and which you can just get ‘regular.’ In a perfect world, we could buy everything organic–it’s better for us, it’s better for the environment, and it supports organic farmers. However, as we all know, organic is more expensive, and as such, sometimes it’s not always feasible to only buy organic.
Luckily, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) put together this awesome list of which fruits and vegetables have the least and the most pesticides in them. Using data from the US Department of Agriculture Pesticide Testing Program, they have put together a shopper’s guide, featuring the ‘Dirty Dozen’–12 fruits and vegetables you should always buy organic– and the ‘Clean 15′–15 fruits and vegetables you can get away with buying traditionally farmed.
On the Dirty Dozen are:
- celery
- peaches
- strawberries
- apples
- blueberries
- nectarines
- bell peppers
- spinach
- kale
- cherries
- potatoes
- grapes (imported)
These fruits and veg round out the Clean 15:
- onions
- avocado
- sweet corn
- pineapple
- mangoes
- sweet peas
- asparagus
- kiwi
- cabbage
- eggplant
- cantaloupe
- watermelon
- grapefruit
- sweet potato
- honeydew melon
This guide was created thinking about fruit how it is typically eaten–i.e., if you wash or peel it, that is incorporated in the statistics, which means washing your apples or berries isn’t going to get them off the Dirty Dozen. However, according to the EWG, making sure you buy organic versions of those fruits and vegetables on the dirty dozen list can lower your pesticide consumption by nearly four-fifths.
Furthermore, My Paper Crane‘s Heidi Kenney has created this super cute wallet-sized card called the Dirty Dozen Cheat Sheet. It’s got the Dirty Dozen on one side and the Clean 15 on the other. You can print it up for free, possibly laminate it, and then stick it in your purse so you always have it to refer back to when you’re at the market.
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