fruits and vegetables.” A key resource it cited was EWG’s Shop- per’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce.
Methodology The Shopper’s Guide ranks pesticide contamination on 47
popular fruits and vegetables based on an analysis of more than 40,900 samples taken by the USDA and FDA. The USDA doesn’t test every food every year, so EWG generally uses data from the most recent one- or two-year sampling period for each food. The USDA doesn’t test honeydew melons and kiwis, so EWG uses data from the FDA’s pesticide monitoring for these crops. Nearly all the tests that serve as the basis for the guide were
conducted by USDA personnel, who washed or peeled produce to mimic consumer practices. It is a reasonable assumption that unwashed produce would be likely to have higher concentrations of pesticide residues, as is typically found in California Depart- ment of Pesticide Regulation tests, which include unwashed, unpeeled produce. To compare foods, EWG looked at six measures of pesticide contamination:
• Percent of samples tested with detectable pesticides. • Percent of samples with two or more detectable pesticides. • Average number of pesticides found on a single sample. • Average amount of pesticides found, measured in parts per million.
• Maximum number of pesticides found on a single sample. • Total number of pesticides found on the crop.
For each metric, we ranked each food based on its individu- al USDA test results and then normalized the scores on a 1 to 100
scale, with 100 being the highest. A food's final score is the total of the six normalized scores from each metric. When domesti- cally grown and imported produce items had notably different scores, we displayed them separately to help guide consumers toward lower-pesticide options. The Shopper's Guide full list shows fruits and vegetables in the order of these final scores. Our goal is to show a range of different measures of pesticide contamination to account for uncertainties in the science. All categories were treated equally. The likelihood that a person would eat multiple pesticides on a single food was given the same weight as amounts of the pesticide detected and the percent of the crop on which any pesticides were found. The Shopper’s Guide is not built on a complex assessment of
pesticide risks but instead reflects the overall pesticide loads of common fruits and vegetables. This approach best captures the uncertainties about the risks and consequences of pesticide ex- posure. Since researchers are constantly developing new insights into how pesticides act on living organisms, no one can say that concentrations of pesticides assumed to be safe today are harm- less.
The Shopper’s Guide aims to give consumers the confidence
that by following EWG’s advice, they can buy foods with fewer types of pesticides and lower overall concentrations of pesticide residues.
This article was adapted and updated from the 2018 Shopper’s Guide.
To print a downloadable PDF of The Shopper's Guide, visit https://
www.ewg.org/foodnews/
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