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No matter where you get your fruits and vegetables, whether it’s a fresh delivery, the organic aisle at the supermarket or straight from a local farm, they all need a good wash before you eat them.
Between bacterial dangers like E.coli, salmonella and listeria, cross-contamination, other people’s hands and the various chemicals left on veggies in the form of pesticides or protectants, no vegetable should avoid a trip to the sink before it enters your mouth. And yes, that includes organic because organic does not mean pesticide-free; it just means no toxic pesticides, a common misconception most grocery shoppers have.
Before you get too worked up about pesticides in your produce, consider that the US Department of Agriculture Pesticide Data Program (PDF) found over 99% of foods sampled measured residue levels that met the safety standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency, with 27% having no detectable pesticide residues at all.
In short: Some residue is OK, and not all chemicals found on food are harmful — you don’t need to freak out over forgetting to wash a handful of fruits and veggies. For instance, a food-grade wax is sprayed on apples to replace the natural wax washed away during the post-harvest cleaning process. Trace amounts of pesticides typically won’t impact your health significantly, but if you’re worried about downing pesticides or other chemicals your food may have been exposed to, you might take a better-safe-than-sorry approach and wash your produce before eating.
Some varieties are more prone to persistent particulates than others, and to help sort the dirtiest produce from the not-so-bad, the Environmental Working Group, a food safety nonprofit, publishes a list of produce most likely to contain pesticides. It’s called The Dirty Dozen, and it’s a cheat sheet of which fruits and vegetables you should always wash.
Strawberries are the produce most likely to have pesticides, according to the study.
The group analyzed 47,510 samples of 46 fruits and vegetables, tested by the US Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture.
The No. 1 offender of pesticides in the group’s latest study? Strawberries. The popular berries had more total instances of chemicals found on them than any other fruit or vegetable included in the sweeping analysis.
Below you’ll find the 12 foods most likely to contain pesticides — and the 15 foods least likely to be tainted.
The Dirty Dozen: The fruits and vegetables to always wash
Foods most likely to contain pesticides, according to FDA and USDA data.
- Strawberries
- Spinach
- Kale, collard and mustard greens
- Grapes
- Peaches
- Pears
- Nectarines
- Apples
- Bell and hot peppers
- Cherries
- Blueberries
- Green beans
Strawberries, spinach and kale are foods you’d be wise to wash thoroughly before eating.
The Dirty Dozen is a good indicator meant to alert consumers to the fruits and vegetables most in need of thorough washing. Even a quick rinse with water or a spritz of produce wash helps.
You can also sidestep much of the potential risk by buying certified organic fruits and vegetables that are free from the use of farming pesticides. Knowing which foods are more likely to contain pesticides might help you decide where to spend that bit of extra money on organic. As I learned in an analysis of organic and nonorganic prices, they aren’t as expensive as you might think.
It doesn’t always make sense to splurge on organic produce.
More takeaways from the Dirty Dozen study
- More than 95% of samples of strawberries, apples, cherries, spinach, nectarines and grapes tested positive for residues of two or more pesticides.
- A total of 209 different pesticides were found on Dirty Dozen items.
- Of those 209, over 50 different pesticides were detected on every type of crop on the list, except cherries.
- Kale, collard and mustard greens, as well as hot peppers and bell peppers, had the most pesticides detected of any crop — 103 and 101 pesticides in total, respectively.
Conversely, the EWG found these 15 fruits and vegetables Ieast likely to contain pesticides.
Foods with naturally occurring protective skin are far less likely to contain potentially harmful pesticides.
The Clean 15: Fruits and vegetables you can skip washing
These are the fruits and vegetables least likely to contain pesticides, according to the study:
- Avocados
- Sweet corn
- Pineapple
- Onions
- Papaya
- Sweet peas (frozen)
- Asparagus
- Honeydew melon
- Kiwi
- Cabbage
- Watermelon
- Mushrooms
- Mangoes
- Sweet Potatoes
- Carrots
The Clean 15 were found to have the lowest levels of pesticide contamination across all of the tested samples, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t contaminated by pesticides at all. It certainly doesn’t mean that the fruits and veggies you’re bringing home aren’t contaminated with bacteria, either. You’d be statistically safer consuming unwashed food from the Clean 15 than the Dirty Dozen, but it’s still a good rule of thumb to rinse all of your fruits and vegetables before eating them.
EWG’s methodology involves six measures of pesticide contamination. The analysis focuses on which fruits and vegetables are most likely to contain one or more pesticides but does not measure how much of any one pesticide is on a given piece of produce. You can read more on the EWG’s Dirty Dozen in the published study here.
Washing fruit and vegetables FAQs
What were the results of Environmental Working Group’s 2024 Shopper’s Guide Dirty Dozen sample testing?
Out of the analyzed tested samples, EWG found that 95% of the samples from the Dirty Dozen fruits and vegetables category were coated in potentially harmful fungicides. On the other hand, nearly 65% of the samples from the Clean Fifteen fruits and vegetables category displayed no detectable amounts of fungicide.
What pesticides were identified by the EWG?
The EWG identified a number of pesticides during the analysis of tested samples, and the organization found that four of the five most common pesticides were potentially dangerous fungicides: fludioxonil, pyraclostrobin, boscalid and pyrimethanil.
