How important is it really to wash fresh fruits and vegetables before eating/cooking them? I do it, but I often wonder if this practice is just nonsense.
Even if it is fruitless (snicker) to wash them, at least it gives you piece of mind. I rinse everything before i eat it or eat/drink from it. There could be pesticides, or a number of things on them. Not to mention just plain old dirt.
[Homer Simpson voice on]
MMMmmmmMMmmmmmmmmmm, pesticides
[Homer Simpson voice /off]
LOL
Though you may think that it is useless and paranoid to wash all fruits and vegetables before you eat them, there are very good reasons to do so.
First of all, almost all fruits and vegetables are grown with some artificial fertilizers/pesticides (even ones labeled “Organic;” that usually just means that they use fertilizers/pesticides whose operative ingredients were extracted from something vaguely natural). These are not chemicals that you want to be eating.
Secondly, in most places agricultural irrigation is provided from water reclamation/purification centers. These do not actually purify water per se, they get most of what they can out of it, and put plenty of chlorine in it to kill any life forms. So, anything that grows right on the ground (nearly alll vegetables) will have residues from whatever might have been in that waste water.
Thirdly, in many large distribution centers, there are many unclean practices which can infect produce with bacteria/viruses that are quite nasty. (I have personal knowledge of this, being related to the local public health director of immunizations, and constantly told about all of the recent outbreaks. Many of these are attributed to not washing food prior to consumption.)
SO… Wash that produce. Really.
Not to mention the lowlifes pawing through displays in the grocery store. It’s a safe bet that a nonvaninshing fraction had a finger up their nose moments before fondling that zucchini you’re about to serve your unsuspecting dinner guests.
Possibly not significant epidemiologically speaking, but I find it worth my time to at least rinse things in cold water just to mitigate the gross-out factor.
I’m with Podkayne. Regardless of whether or not there’s pesticides on my peaches, I’ll wash 'em because of that soccer mom with 3 snotty faced sneezing kids in her cart who pawed through the entire display to find the ones she wants. Yuk!
Athena beat me to it.
I’m washing off the germs of the people who touched the stuff before me. Especially when I see people pick stuff up and sniff it right up against their nose.
There is also the little matter of E. Coli contamination in the field. The folks who pick fruits and veggies are often not provided with toilet facilities, so they crap in between the rows. Where porta-toilets are furnished, hand-washing sinks are not. So, the folks who picked your produce may well have had poop on their hands.
I’ve heard (from someone studying ETox) that pesticide residue on produce is hardly enough to be dangerous to you, and in addition not likely to wash off that easily. However, he recommended washing for the other reasons already given here (getting rid of dirt, feces, other gross things).
The problem with pesticides (and residue) is that the pickers handle a lot of the produce and thus are more exposed to it, plus the amount that washes away while growing or spraying and can enter the water supply.
Plus, if you’d really like to be grossed out, consider canned vegetables sometime. I knew an inspector for a tomato-canning place where there are standards like 2% mold, 1% insects, etc.
panama jack
#include <std_disclaimer.h>
#include <IIRC.h>
Don’t worry, canned food is sterilized with heat, the bugs and mold won’t hurt you, and may actually provide nutritional content. Food is a dirty business. Animals are full of poop, plants grow in dirt that’s full of decomposing guk. Hell, even your own body is full of disgusting stuff, a normal adult has 18 pounds of bacteria in their gut.
There’s an old saying I used to hear from my Grandmother, “You’ll eat a peck of dirt in your lifetime.”
Now if I could just remember how many pecks are in a bushel…
My brother-in-law is a manager at T.G.I. Friday’s and tells me that they have a special soultion that they bathe all their veggies in before cooking with them. Apparently, by the end of the solution’s life (something like 50lbs of food), it’s one nasty looking bucket of goo. According to him, there’s a noticable layer of sediment on the bottom, not to mention whatever is floating about in the liquid itself. I didn’t ask at the time, but I’m assuming (hoping) that they rinse the veggies in water after removing them from the cleaning solution.
Chas.E sez:
Aha! So THAT’s why I get the runs sometimes. 
Just what might these cleaning solutions be ? One is getting advertised - I forget the name - for home use. My guess was citric acid, or something similar. Any ideas which are being used, or what might be best ?
I have 2 brands of fruit-and-veggie wash next to my sink. (1 in a spray bottle, and another in a regular bottle I bought to refill it with.) One contains water, anionic surfactant, and sodium citrate, the other contains water, non-ionic& anionic suractants, and polysorbate-20. My dishwashing liquid contains vegetable based cleaning agent (anionic surfactant),salt and citrus based fragrance.
So far as I can tell, they are just dish soap, diluted and packaged in a spray bottle.
I have always washed my produce, having learned a thing or two working in commercial kitchens. While washing away pesticide residues is certainly a good idea, your more immediate danger comes from bacteria left behind by other people. You have to be most careful with produce that has an irregular surface, which gives the bacteria a place to hide. The netted surface of a cantaloupe, for instance, is much more likely to harbor bacteria than the smooth surface of a honeydew.
If the lunch counter tuna fish sandwich you had today made you sick, it was most likely not the mayonnaise, or even the tuna that was at fault. The most likely culprit was the celery. The ribs are very hard to clean properly. In fact, in a commercial kitchen, celery is blanched (dunked briefly in boiling water) before it is cut.
They have commercials showing the kitchen workers using that new FIT fruit & veggie wash. I got a sample in the mail and used it on some fruit. The water wasn’t nearly as dirty when I was done as the TGIFriday’s commercial shows.
I did rinse them really well under runnning water after I washed them. I don’t want to be eating soap residue, either.
In addition to worrying about the artificial fertilizers, you also need to worry about the organic fertilizers. Many farms spread manure on the fields before growing season, and some spray “liquid manure” (poop + water) during the growing season. One place on I-94 north of Portage, WI has a sign that says “Fertilized with natural pig manure”. Smells like it, too.
Can you say “E. Coli” or “Cryptosporidium”