Apples are #1 among the Dirty Dozen??

The Environmental Working Group, a non-profit advocacy group published a new Dirty Dozen list a couple weeks ago, and egads!.. apples have moved up from #4 to #1.  Oh no!  The Dirty Dozen list is a compilation of fruits and vegetables which carry the most pesticide.  No, you can’t wash it away.  The stuff is taken up and becomes part and parcel of the fruit, and no, you can’t pare away the skin to reveal a pesticide-free piece of fruit.  Government data revealed that 92% of apples contain two or more pesticides!  EWG figures that possibly some of the apples are being treated with pesticides and fungicides post-harvest to lengthen their shelf life.  Pesticides are toxic to nervous systems, cause cancer, disrupt hormones and cause brain damage in children.  The Harvard School of Public Health found that children exposed to high level of pesticides run a greater risk of ADHD.  If you would like a downloadable printable copy of the new Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen, you can find it here .  

What can you do about this latest pesticide scare?  You can choose to purchase organic apples, you can choose from other fruits and vegetables from the Clean list; or you can grow your own.

I used to have apple trees.  I had the most delicious tasting Jonathons you could ever find anywhere on earth.  We never sprayed our trees.  My husband found that when he gets “chemicals” on his skin, he immediately gets a really weird, nasty taste in his mouth.  So we opted out of the whole chemical-pesticide-fungicide thing.  I can tell you that a lot, and I mean A LOT of our apples had worm holes in them.  (The usual telltale sign is some brown “coffee grounds”-looking material around the blossom-end of the fruit.)  It was more work when I prepared the apples for pies and applesauce, and a lot of the apples just had to be discarded.  It was never a good experience to bite into one of them and find half a worm.. LOL- much worse than finding a whole worm, but I digress….  In looking into how to tend apple trees without using pesticides I found a huge list of problems that can affect apples.  The western part of the country produces more organic apples than the Eastern and Midwestern states.  Why?  Because of the drier conditions and sandier soil in the western apple producing states, there are far fewer pests.  So the growers in the other regions with the wetter and more humid environments have a lot more to contend with, and therefore a lot more work to produce an organic product!  If you would like to look into growing your own and going pesticide free, you could check out this growing organic apples website.  Good luck with that.  I’ll probably just keep buying organic or risk finding “half a worm” in my fruit. :)