New Year's Reasons to Treasure your Farmer's Market

Once again the courageous Environmental Working Group has released its list of the most pesticide infested foods you can buy in your supermarket.  Bless them. When you read it below (bold face type is mine), you'll see you can buy all the bad stuff in a good version from your local farmer.

The Shopper’s Guide, updated every year since 2004, is broken down into two easy-to-use lists, the Dirty Dozen^TM and the Clean Fifteen^TM. The Dirty Dozen list includes the top 12 fruits and vegetables with the highest amounts of pesticide residues, while the Clean 15 list has the 15 cleanest, or least contaminated produce. Apples tend to have the most pesticides because of the chemicals applied to the crop before and after harvest to preserve them longer, the analysts said.
Other produce items on the 2015 Dirty Dozen^TMlist are strawberries, grapes, celery, spinach, sweet bell peppers, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, imported snap peas and potatoes.
Since leafy greens and hot peppers were frequently contaminated with insecticides that are particularly toxic to human health, EWG highlights these items in its Dirty Dozen Plus^TM category.
Avocados were the cleanest item on the list, with only one percent of samples showing any detectable pesticides. Other items on the 2015 Clean Fifteen^TM list include sweet corn, pineapples, cabbage, sweet peas (frozen), onions, asparagus, mangoes, papayas, kiwi, eggplant, grapefruit, cantaloupe, and cauliflower.
“We are saying, eat your fruits and vegetables,” said Sonya Lunder, EWG’s senior analyst. “But know which ones have the highest amounts of pesticides so you can opt for the organic versions, if available and affordable, or grab a snack off the Clean Fifteen^TM.”
A recent study shows people who buy organic produce have lower levels of organophosphate insecticides measured in their bodies even though they eat more produce than people who buy mostly conventional grown fruits and vegetables.