To Buy Organic or To Not Buy Organic, That is the Question

If you are anything like me, you enter the produce section at your local grocery store with every intention of doing right by yourself and your family and buying 100% organic.  But you start looking at all the options and comparing prices and realize how much more economical the “regular” stuff is and end up walking out of the grocery store without anything organic at all!  So for me, it’s either break the bank and buy all organic, throw the whole idea out the window and just buy what is cheap, or make an uneducated guess and choose to buy only some things organic.   Well option #3 is the path I want to take only I don’t want it to be an uneducated guess.  I want to have some sort of rhyme or reason to the madness.  So I started to research and was so excited with my findings that I wanted to share with you. 

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a non-profit organization that conducts studies to determine which fruits and vegetables have more residual pesticides and therefore are the most important to buy organic.  They list 49 fruits and vegetables in order from most residual pesticides to least residual pesticides and they call the top 12 their Dirty Dozen™.  These are the top 12 fruits and vegetables that, if you had to pick and choose which ones to buy organic, you’d want these to be your organic picks.  Bingo!!  By consuming the Dirty Dozen™ in its conventional (non-organic) form, you could be exposed to an average of 10 pesticides a day, according to the EWG site.  By the time you get to the bottom of the list (they call the last 15 their Clean Fifteen™) you are only exposed to an average of 2 pesticides a day.  For more specifics on the methodology and the findings, click here.

And now, drumroll please, here is the eagerly awaited list!  

Click here for a printable version.  Print it, clip it and stash it in your wallet!  This is the most valuable paper I have in my wallet….next to my Benjamins of course (more like Lincolns and Washingtons in my case).    Oh and they also have an iPhone App so the list is just a slide and a tap away!  I hope you all are as excited about this list as I am.  There may be others out there as well published by other organizations.  If you know of any, we’d love to hear about them.  Now it’s time for me to clip some coupons so I can go to the grocery store tomorrow.  Happy Shopping!