According to standard kitchen protocol, you’re supposed to wash your vegetables before eating or serving them. Why?
In short - to remove or significantly reduce any residues of chemicals (pesticides, herbicides, etc.) that might have been sprayed on them or that they may have been exposed to.
Washing the vegetables is also helpful in removing any animal feces from what you intent to eat.
But it’s your choice, really.
It’s not just chemicals. Vegetables can be contaminated by bacteria from manure. There was a food poisoning incident in Japan that was traced to radish sprouts contaminated with e-coli.
There have been many many many incidents of food poisoning from dirty produce.
You wash them because…they grow in dirt?
What do I win, Alex?
But you tend not to scrub the hell out of a head of lettuce; you usually just run some water over it for a few seconds, or some other perfunctory action that just suggests some sort of half-assed nod towards cleanliness. Is there really a point if you’re not going to really clean it?
Not just chemicals, but bacteria and viruses too:
FDA stops green onions from 3 Mexican suppliers
Controlling foodborne hepatitis A outbreaks related to green onions
Foodborne Outbreaks of Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli–Rhode Island and New Hampshire, 1993
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply it was a rare occurrence. The incident I mentioned was a major and well-publicized outbreak with 17 dead and over 9000 sick, caused by a particularly nasty strain of e-coli (O157:H7).
What I’m getting at is, if you don’t wash with soap, are you really doing anything to prevent Hepatitis A contamination? I don’t really see how running water over some green onions will do much of anything.
Well, you also get rid of grit, which is just nasty.
Germsies are ever present on all food. They like eating them as much as you do and then they multiply. So you wash them off as close to eating them as possible.
I don’t think eating soap is all that healthy either 
And green onions tend to have dirt on them.
The problem is that rinsing veggies under running water is not getting the germsies off the food. Rising veggies is mainly getting off the dirt.
Exactly. Okay, I understand not wanting to eat dirt (even if it probably won’t hurt you), but is it fallacious to think that washing (without soap) is going to alleviate the chance of contamination?
Even soap won’t remove all the possible contamination. What washing does is reduce the actual dose of contaminant down by a few orders of magnitude. When dining, would you prefer to ingest 10[sup]3[/sup] E. Coli or 10[sup]6[/sup]? Keep in mind, that generally a large dose of said contaminant is needed to make one sick.
Nope. Without soap, the rinsing and mechanical action will get rid of some bugs. With soap, you’ll get rid of some more. Short of autoclaving your veggies prior to cooking, you’ll be hard pressed to get rid of all organisms. Fortunately, you don’t have to get rid of all organisms to decrease your chances of getting sick; you just have to decrease the inoculum to a level where your digestive system is likely to kill what’s left.
Damn you Qadgop! Shouldn’t you be off attending to the tranship hull or something? 
I was perhaps a bit hasty when I originally just mentioned washing to get rid of residue as subsequent posters have pointed out the problems with respect to both dirt (more or less removed by washing with cold water) and bacterial contamination (cold water washing of limited value).
What previous posters haven’t touched on, and I think is important, is what will be done to the vegetables (produce) before serving.
If they are to be cooked then the probability of bacterial contamination is greatly reduced as a function of the temperature and time that they are exposed to heat.
If however, they are to be served raw, then I think you have the dilemma addressed in previous postings. Short of the suggestion of running everything through the autoclave (steamed vegetables anyone?) analogy, you have to use common sense regarding the source of the vegetables (home grown, store bought, etc.) and the sensitivity of the people consuming the vegetables (the state of the relative strength/weakness of their immune system). Other factors may also be important.
Those who do the picking…you think they run to the bathroom, do their business, and wash their hands before putting their hands on those veggies?