What commercial crops are the most sprayed or treated

[Sweet savory]

Interesting thread and links. I do buy organic local (as I can get) flour for my bread. A farmer’s wife told me she has to buy organic carrots as husband reckons they are one of the most sprayed crops.

[SimpleSimon]

A friend of mine is an engineer in a factory that makes many different herbicides and other such things. Some are banned for sale in the UK/EU and go to China. The rest are for agriculture in the UK. Some of the stories he was telling me about how they are used was jaw dropping. Suffice it to say that the amount that stuff is sprayed was way beyond I'd ever have imagined.

[bikermike]

That list is food for thought (so to speak), but don't forget that is a US list, and US agri practices are different, to ours (well, as yet...), so th elist will be different.

I would probably work on the principle that any non-organic fruit and veg you eat has been sprayed, so the trick is to grow what you can grow best to avoid eating the stuff.

Also, I'm willing to bet that a lot of stuff that is out of season is sprayed more - as there is more money in the crop, and the plants will be grown in more artificial ways - so avoid eating out of season stuff.

The other thing to bear in mind, is that freshness is pretty key to a vegetable's taste, so a strawberry eaten off the plant will taste better than the same strawberry sat in a distribution chain for days.

[ecudc]

My guess would be in Europe potatoes for blight, brassicas for cabbage white butterflies, aphids and whitefly. Possibly I’ve avoid lettuce as it soaks up everything, especially iceberg. I know in America they nuke strawberry beds but in Europe I think they are mainly grown off ground now. You can obviously buy organic veg for anything you are not growing yourself. Flowers and Kenyan beans too as African due to low regulation of pesticides and herbicides so much so that workers are affected. Spanish polyhouses have a bit of a rep for very poor working conditions and dumping of used plastic.