Why Choose Organic Strawberries?
Contributed by Peggy Miars, Earthbound Farm

Strawberries are the ambrosial beauties of summer fruit. Ruby red. Sweet like candy. Pure delight. And in the absence of salt-based conventional fertilizers, organic strawberries ripen more leisurely, with more time to soak up nutrients from sun and soil. They have a higher solid content and a lower water content, which yields an even more flavorful piece of fruit.

Although those conventional strawberries may look as lovely, there are definite differences. A typical grower of conventional strawberries may use methyl bromide, chloropicrin, Captan, malathion, Diprom, Vendex, Kelthane, and Avermectin to bring a crop of strawberries to market (371 pesticides are approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for use on strawberries). Any of these may show up in your strawberry basket in the form of legally allowable pesticide residues. On occasion, residues are found to exceed even current legally allowable tolerances, the safety of which has been called into question by Consumers Union and other reputable groups, especially for children.

Choosing organic strawberries, grown with no toxic and persistent chemicals, is the smart alternative. Yes, you may notice a higher sticker price for organic strawberries than for their conventional cousins.

But what's the real price of those conventional strawberries? Invisible to most consumers, there are indirect costs of conventional food production such as cleanup of polluted water, replacement of eroded soils, and costs of health care for farm workers. If we included these costs in the price of food, organic foods would cost the same as (or even less than) conventional foods. So when you're yearning for a sweet, ripe summer strawberry, go organic. It'll be sweeter for the earth, sweeter in your mouth, and sweeter for the health of your family.

Selected Sources

1. "How Safe is Our Produce?" report by Consumers Union of U.S., March 1999
2. "Update: Pesticides in Children's Food: An Analysis of 1998 USDA PDP Data on Pesticide Residues," Edward Groth III, PhD., Charles M. Benbrook, PhD and Karen Lutz, M.S., Consumers Union of U.S., Inc., May 2000
3. U.S. EPA Web site, "What the Pesticide Residue Limits Are on Food."