…or is it just MY room?
For many years we bought organic vegetables delivered to our door by Riverford. We not only liked the fact that these vegetables were free from pesticides and other chemicals, but also that the farm that supplied them was fairly local.
Then the price of everything went up, and reluctantly we stopped by buying organic vegetables and bought vegetables from the local supermarket instead.
We also attempted to grow our own vegetables; we had most success growing green leafy vegetables like salad leaves, spinach, and chard – but not so much success growing squashes and swedes and other root vegetables.
At the back of my mind I had this niggling feeling that buying vegetables that had been sprayed with toxic chemicals wasn’t a good way to feed my husband who had a chronic neurological disorder, and yet we couldn’t sustain by buying organic vegetables. I wasn’t growing enough vegetables myself to keep our vegetable supply going. What did I do?
I put my head in the sand, that’s what I did.
I tried to ignore the problem: the vegetables looked clean enough I thought to myself – therefore they’re probably okay, even though I knew this wasn’t true.
Then I saw an advert for funny capsule thing that you put in the water that your soaking your vegetables in and decommissions the chemical toxins they’ve been applied and sprayed to the vegetables of fruit. It’s called the Produce Pro from Luxande, and this is what the manufacturers said;
It is called Produce Pro™, a new revolutionary food cleaning device that can remove up to 99% of all toxins in our foods within 5 quick minutes. It is the secret to the ultimate healthy lifestyle, free of toxins that our bodies reject and ultimately cause diseases in the long term.
How Does It Work?
At this point, you are most likely skeptical after trying other produce cleaning methods that don’t deliver on all that is promised. Those other methods add up to cost up 10 times more over the course of 5 years of use and usually leave a terrible odor and aftertaste on your fruits and veggies that make them unbearable. After years of testing conducted by top universities and scientists around the world, a breakthrough combination was found:
– Sodium – Electrolysis – H2O
Combining these three elements together was found to be the secret to producing the most effective portable fruit and vegetable purifier on the market!
Anyway – it was nearly £100 pounds, and I have a scam alert because I’m naïve enough to be scammed by new products, so I walked on by. But my interest in the need to remove toxic chemicals from my fruit and vegetables was re-awakened. I started to Google..
Some people it seems use white vinegar in a bowl of water to remove ‘toxins’, some people use bicarbonate of soda. I even found a paper from University of Massachusetts which stated :
‘Surface pesticide residues were most effectively removed by sodium bicarbonate (baking soda, NaHCO3) solution when compared to either tap water or Clorox bleach’
Effectiveness of Commercial and Homemade Washing Agents in Removing Pesticide Residues on and in Apples Tianxi Yang,† Jeffery Doherty,‡,§ Bin Zhao,† Amanda J. Kinchla,† John M. Clark,‡,§ and Lili He*,† † Department of Food Science and ‡ Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, United States § Massachusetts Pesticide Analysis Laboratory, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, United States
So I put the required amount of bicarb in a bowl of warm water, soaked my vegetables for 12 minutes, then rubbed them over a bit. I think the small print of this study qualifies the statement somewhat, and I know it isn’t perfect, but it’s making me feel [a bit] better even though I know the toxins are coming off the vegetables completely.
If you can’t afford organic vegetables, and you don’t grow your own, what do you do to remove the toxic pesticides from your vegetables and fruit?
Were you like me, avoiding the elephant in the room while trying to consume a ‘healthy’ diet? Or is it just me that hasn’t got this sorted…
