More important than how often you eat organic is which types of organic produce you choose to eat. The Environmental Working Group recently released a shopper’s guide to minimizing exposure to pesticides from produce. The guide ranks the pesticide contamination levels of 47 popular fruits and vegetables based on an analysis of 87,000 tests for pesticides on these foods, conducted from 2000 to 2007 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.

The ranking was based on composite scores of the following six measures:
    * Percent of the samples tested with detectable pesticides
    * Percent of the samples with two or more pesticides
    * Average number of pesticides found on a sample
    * Average amount (level in parts per million) of all pesticides found
    * Maximum number of pesticides found on a single sample
    * Number of pesticides found on the commodity in total

The group created two lists based on the findings of each produce item’s score. The first list contains the top 12 fruits and vegetables with the highest levels of contamination – which they recommend as the most important to buy organically grown. The second list shows which out of the 47 items consistently have the lowest concentrations of pesticides. These items are assumed to be safer to eat when organic is not an option.

Every one of our produce departments is a state certified produce handler, accredited by the Washington State Department of Agriculture and third-party audited. We offer a wide selection of organically grown produce. Meanwhile, we understand that eating organically grown produce is not always practical. For the times when it’s not an option, you can minimize your exposure risk by choosing items with lower contamination rates and washing your produce thoroughly before consumption.