I am looking at the January 28th, 2014 edition of The St. Lawrence Plaindealer. (Ok, I wrote this over 2 years ago... where does the time go? and never posted it.)  The FARM FOCUS section has an article titled: "Important to Properly Clean Produce." The last paragraph, in this short article, had this statement: The Pure Food Growers of America states that the average American consumes more than 10 pounds of insecticides and herbicides every year from produce.

Their answer to this consuming pesticide problem is in the article’s title:

"Important to Properly Clean Produce"

I have a few ideas of my own around this “just wash it off” issue.  Is it really just a matter of washing the produce well?  This sounds like a good plan, on the surface. However, when we think about chemicals and the permeability of the produce’s skin and the soil the produce is grown in, the actual picture looks a bit different.