The Environmental Working Group's Dirty Dozen Plus and Clean Fifteen List

The Dirty Dozen + and the Clean Fifteen

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that leads investigations and research on toxins and environmental health, food and agriculture, and water and energy. Every year they test pesticide contamination on 48 popular fruits and vegetables and report their findings in a shopper’s guide. This guide is very helpful for those of us who can’t afford to buy everything organic. It helps us to make more informed choices when choosing produce.

The Dirty Dozen + are the fruits and vegetables found to contain the highest amount of pesticide residue (peeled or unpeeled). The Clean Fifteen are least likely to contain pesticide residue.

I know it gets really expensive to buy everything organic, so this guide is extremely helpful when shopping so you can spend your money wisely. If you eat apples every day, it would be in your best interest to buy organic ones. On the other hand, even if you eat avocados every day (like I do), you don’t really need to spend the extra money for the organic variety since the pesticide residue is so low. Typically the fruits and vegetables with thicker skin will have lower levels of pesticide residue. I would suggest always buying organic greens because the pesticides can easily get trapped in the leaves. And if you’re eating greens at every meal you will want to prevent repeated exposure.

Following is the Dirty Dozen Plus and Clean Fifteen lists. The “plus” category contains foods that have been found to have trace levels of highly hazardous pesticides. They do not meet the traditional ranking criteria, but were frequently found to be contaminated with insecticides toxic to the human nervous system.

You can read more about the EWG’s testing processes and find the full report here.

EWG’s Dirty Dozen Plus

1. Apples
2. Peaches
3. Nectarines
4. Strawberries
5. Grapes
6. Celery
7. Spinach
8. Sweet bell peppers
9. Cucumbers
10. Cherry tomatoes
11. Snap peas – imported
12. Potatoes
+ Hot Peppers
+ Kale / Collard greens

The Clean Fifteen

1. Avocados
2. Sweet Corn*
3. Pineapples
4. Cabbage
5. Sweet peas frozen
6. Onions
7. Asparagus
8. Mangos
9. Papayas*
10. Kiwi
11. Eggplant
12. Grapefruit
13. Cantaloupe
14. Cauliflower
15. Sweet potatoes

* A small amount of sweet corn, papaya and summer squash sold in the United States is produced from genetically engineered seeds. Buy organic varieties of these crops if you want to avoid GMOs.