Who is Responsible for the Quality of our Food?

By Bill Adler, MPH, RS
Technical Food Safety Consultant

My wife and I just finished a Sustainable Food class through the community college.  I was thinking it was going to be about sustainable agriculture, but to my eternal surprise, it proved to be much better.  The course was chiefly about gardening, from individual efforts around the world to corporate-sized endeavors, including a variety of topics from food deserts in our bigger cities, to turning marginal lands into corporation-sized farms;  it was very interesting.

I was struck, however, by the number of pests wanting to eat what’s grown. It is simply amazing that a farmer, of any size, can get a crop delivered to the market at all, but if you want to market apples, lettuce, beans, and tomatoes with blemishes, that’s always the option. However, most of us like produce that doesn’t look like it’s on its last legs at the market.

In a nutshell, small producers can, with lots of manual labor, remove the Japanese beetles, wash off the aphids and thrips, and who knows what they do for cutworms, though I think they have to pick them off each tomato plant, every day.  Producers can also use chemicals and cultivation to do the work for them. You can always produce and market organic foods, but even organically produced crops are allowed some chemicals, and that’s why it’s important to use Fruit & Vegetable Wash.

The food chain goes something like this:  farmers grow, harvest, and sell to wholesale marketers. They’re not required to wash the crops they sell. The wholesalers either sort, combine and send to consumer markets, supermarkets, or the products go to companies that make something of it (process).  Some of the wholesale marketers rinse off produce but not all do.  We, as consumers, are the ultimate end-users, and it is up to us to take the final step of cleaning that produce, or we face eating what wasn’t washed off in the chain of handlers before it came to us.  Since produce is offered in big bins and store shelves, other consumers get to touch, pick over, poke, prod, attempt to dent, and finally, decide to take or not take everything they touched.  Those consumer hands, which weren’t washed before the produce was handled, are the end result of using never washed cellphones, touching never washed steering wheels, wiping kid’s runny noses, touching pets, and so on.  Every time you take an apple, pear, tomato, melon, green bean, green/yellow/red pepper, and a myriad list of other bulk produce, this is what’s already on the surface.  As the ultimate consumers of unprocessed fruits and vegetables, it’s up to us to wash our produce with Fruit & Vegetable Wash before eating it.

Earth’s Natural Fruit and Vegetable Wash takes off the wax that long-term storage companies put on.  It removes the pesticides that were used in growing.  And it removes the grime that was left from other people’s hands.  Now you have produce that will taste better and be clean enough to eat.  Enjoy!

“Carry-Over”

By Bill Adler, MPH, RS
Technical Food Safety Consultant

Last week, I visited friends who live in very rural Winona County.  They live on a piece of land I would describe as ‘God’s Country’ because it is coiffed with prairie meadows of natural flowers, tall grass, butterflies, and tall sweetcorn.  Seriously, I expected Julie Andrews to fly out singing, “the hills are alive, with the sound of music..”.  They have a big garden, a tall fence, and blueberries the size of nickels.  But, being surrounded by farm fields, they also face pesticide carry-over.

On my way back, I spotted a low flying helicopter.  It looked odd until I realized it had spray arms and it was a crop duster, getting ready to make a pass on an assigned field of soybeans.  If you’ve never seen this done, it is pretty amazing to see them skim the crop.  Even with corn 5 ft tall, they appear to be just a couple feet above the tassels.  The prop wash, be it from a helicopter or small plane, causes the pesticide cloud to drift.  Of course, most go on the crop below, but some carry over to surrounding areas.  And if there is more than a slight wind, the cloud may drift quite a distance.

It would be ideal if all of our produce came from small plot growers.  Alas, that’s not the case. A quick internet search will show you 70% of the fruits and vegetables we consume in winter months, come from outside the United States. Growers are restricted as to the chemicals they can use to produce a crop sold to the US market, but only a small, statistically significant percentage of samples are checked for chemical residues, so the potential is there for surface contamination to exist. Grocery stores and even the super supermarkets are under no obligation to clean produce, and they don’t.  That part of food safety is left up to you and me, the consumers. You see where this is going, don’t you?  If you don’t wash off the pesticides, nobody else is going to do it for you.

Herbicides and pesticides are oil-based.  It’s how they stick to the plants and hang around long enough to keep our food looking good.  Water alone doesn’t do much to dissolve or wash away natural or synthetic chemicals.  You owe it to yourselves to clean the chemicals off your food before you eat it.  Life’s Pure Balance fruit and veggie wash does this for you.  At about 9 cents each time you mix it, the bank won’t be broken and your family will have produce that tastes good and is free of chemical contaminants.

Bill Adler is an expert in food safety, foodborne illnesses, and the food service inspection industry. He has conducted training for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) teaching local, state, and federal disease investigators as well as working with laboratory specialists and epidemiologists. Bill has worked extensively with the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) to perform food service inspections and train local and state public health employees.