How do you wash your vegetables and fruits?

What about washing your meats and vegetables in an ozone cleaner?

https://www.amazon.com/Ultrasonic-Vegetable-Sterilizer-Cleaner-Moredental/dp/B010739TWO/

LOL, now that looks like an expensive item to experiment with. I am not that fancy. :wink:

:wink: I am not even sure if it is a healthy thing to do, but apparently some are using it to treat their foods.

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I read this morning an article on insecticides and fongicides fruit washing. They did some test on the best way to wash your fruits. Take strawberry (from Poland) for example, it has 10 fungicides and 6 insecticides. Rinsing with tap wash is not doing much at all. Cover the fruits for 2 minutes is still not good enough. The best way is immense in boiling water but the fruits would be cooked. The second best way is to immense the fruits in tap water with baking soda for 15 minutes, the same result using ultra sound. Ozone enriched water is the third best way.

If fruits and vegetables really are contaminated with high level of pesticides, then one shouldn’t even eat them to begin with.

However, vast majority of the time people are just overthinking it. If concern, washing with vinegar, table salt water and baking soda will help.

"Washing with acetic acid solutions (at 10% concentration for 20 min) caused 79.8%, 65.8%, 74.0% and 75.0% loss of the above pesticides, respectively. Washing with NaCl solutions (at 10% concentration for 20 min) produced 67.2%, 65.0%, 73.3% and 74.1% loss, respectively, and washing by tap water (for 20 min) were 17.6%, 17.1%, 19.1% and 15.2% loss, respectively. The reductions due to the refrigeration (for 48 h) were 3.4%, 2.6%, 3.1% and 3.6%, respectively, and those due to the stir-frying (for 5 min) were 86.6%, 67.5%, 84.7% and 84.8%, respectively. "

Strawberries are one of the items that I wil not eat unless they are organically grown.

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Soaking strawberries with water is not eatable.

I wash vegetables under the tap. So did Mum. It has worked for me for 67 years without a problem. I’m not about to invent a problem now.

As for meat, I follow the official advice not to wash it. That said, I didnt wash it before I knew there was official advice.

(Yes, I know we Britons are dirty, unhygenic morons in comparison with much of American food health culture. It surprises me that we havent died out as a nation decades ago.)

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French Apple has a lot of treatment, 36 - 43 times, I guess we should buy organic apples.

We don’t soak them, just rinse with cold water. But we only buy organic berries.

I think your mom’s days, it has much less treatment.

Actually, I just run fruit and vegetables briefly under the tap too, sometimes, not even, especially those I need to peel the skin.

That is certainly not true, unless you let me spray DDT on you like this.

and of course, eating DDT:

Really? Are you real? Or are you an imagination in my head? :sweat_smile:
I am kidding.
Yes, this was originally a post about “defrosting tray”, and I was trying to say how sometime we create an issue bigger than it really is, and then sell a product or a solution to solve this “big” problem.

In most case, people health are directly related to what they eat, not the contaminants. In other words, if I eat slice of cake everyday, the fat, sugar and starch of the cake are significantly more impactful to my health than the pesticides in the wheat to produce the flour.

Yep. Understood.

On a serious note, I buy organic fruit and veg when I can (which is quite regularly as I also try to eat seasonally). I wash it very carefully. After all, organic veg won’t have pesticides on it - but it probably has shit on it from the organic fertiliser.

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Nothing wrong with washing. I was at a street market, and I saw the movers dropped an entire cardbox (or two) of fruits in the road drainage (between the road and the pedestrian pavement). He just picked them up, put them back in the cardbox… I have no idea if they are going to toss them or sell them. There are plenty things can go wrong between the farm and your kitchen.

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They still have certain chemical treatment, like copper fungicide on peaches. Don’t know why, in gardening supplies, they sell this thing as organic when it is toxic for the environment. Maybe overdose of heavy metal is other problem. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Because organic pesticides only mean they are not synthetic compounds.

Melons, tomatoes, eggplant, anything that may have touched soil, I wash in warm, soapy water. I have a special brush to scrub if necessary.

For berries, I buy from farmers market and cross my fingers that everything will be okay.

One thing that freaks me out a bit is how many people have touched fruit before you ever get to it. So oranges, apples, plums and any other delicious fruits people like to fondle before buying - those also get a soapy bath.

What kind of soapy water do you use?

Just a bit of dishwashing detergent in a tub of very hot water. Nothing fancy. :slight_smile: