Organic Produce

It's very important to me to buy organic, local produce, as much as possible. A great farmer's market is one of my favorite things in life. Via my daily World's Healthiest Foods email, with a reference to the Environmental Working Group (EWG):

If pesticides are present on the surfaces of your fruits and vegetables, you can definitely remove a substantial amount of those surface pesticides through careful washing and light scrubbing. However, you cannot remove all of them nor can you remove pesticides that have been incorporated into the fruits and vegetables while they were growing.

From field to field and from year to year, the amount of pesticides used on different fruit and vegetable crops can vary greatly. However, some environmental organizations, like the Environmental Working Group (EWG) headquartered in Washington, D.C., have sampled large groups of fruits and vegetables to determine which non-organic foods most consistently contain pesticide residues (and how many different residues they contain). To see more details about the EWG pesticide measurement process, you can visit the EWG website at: http://www.foodnews.org/fulldataset.php. The worst offenders in the group have sometimes been tagged with the name, "Dirty Dozen." Here are the EWG's pesticide results, where we highlight the "Dirty Dozen" and also point to the "Cleanest Dozen," those found to have the least amount of pesticide residues:

Ranking	The "Dirty Dozen"	The "Cleanest Dozen"
1.	Peaches	Onions
2.	Apples	Avocados
3.	Sweet Bell Peppers	Sweet Corn (frozen)
4.	Celery	Pineapples
5.	Nectarines	Sweet Peas (frozen)
6.	Cherries	Asparagus
7.	Lettuce	Kiwifruit
8.	Grapes (imported)	Bananas
9.	Pears	Ultra Pasteurization (UP)
10.		Cabbage
11.	Spinach	Broccoli
12.	Potatoes	Eggplant

Source: Environmental Working Group (2005). Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce. Available online at: http://www.foodnews.org/methodology.php.