Red, juicy, sweet strawberries, can you just taste them? We live in California the capital of “strawberry” growing. When in the season you can see for miles the fields of strawberries and the cute little stands with people lined up to buy baskets upon baskets of strawberries. I remember noticing for the first time when I was pregnant, a field right on the corner of my neighborhood a BIG sign reading warning, fumigation, poison. I recall discussing with my husband after and think I won’t be buying strawberries from that field. Well, it turns out strawberries have a dark story behind them.
The Dark News About Strawberries
Methyl Bromide is one of the chemicals sprayed on your strawberries at the beginning stage of growth. Methyl Bromide sterilizes the soil, is extremely toxic and kills everything in its path. Some think that sterilized soil is mandatory to growing plants and it turns out some plants will only grow in sterilized soil, now with genetically modified growing. This isn’t how farming started, right? We know the earth is full of organisms, worms, fungi, bacteria, insects, grass, and debris. Sterilization helps the soil kill off diseases and insects and helps farmers quickly turn over crops.
In traditional farming( the old days), farmers would sterilize with the sun, bake out the bad things they didn’t want in the soil, by laying plastic tightly over the area. It takes time and crops are rotated to keep the process going. Farmers would rotate crop fields with different types of produce like broccoli in between the strawberry growing time to change the soil medium.
Sterilization with the use of toxic chemicals is used whether you purchase organic or traditional strawberries. They all start out the same. Strawberries are extremely prone to insects and pest problems, which is why all farming uses the chemicals to keep up with the crops.
Methyl Bromide banned some time ago, but farmers are still able to use specifically on strawberry fields. Doesn’t make sense right? If a chemical is banned, there is a reason. Methyl Iodine is a replacement, but it isn’t much better, and scientist believe it is just as toxic, and a reactive chemical.
So what do you do? How can organic strawberries still be organic? Before berries start to grow the methyl bromide still be, once they begin to develop, there is no use of a synthetic spray, which allows strawberries to be still be technically organic.
Organic strawberries would still be the way to go some things, however, to look for are the farmers not spraying chemicals and rotating crops for a pesticide free berry. Purchasing pure organic, non-sprayed berries is possible. What to look for; buy at a local farmers market, ask the farmer if the use methyl bromide. Or methyl iodine. The EWG just came out with their report of the dirty dozen, clean fifteen. Strawberries were at the top of the list. In their research and testing, strawberries had the highest pesticide residues, which means the residue gets into the berry. In some case studies up to 24 residual pesticides. View the EWG complete list of dirty dozen clean fifteen ewg.org/foodnews/summary.php .
This list is helpful and can be saved to your phone for easy shopping review.
