I'd like to buy organic, but... (Pt. 1)

In a perfect world, I'd buy all-organic food—not so much from paranoia, that everything else is poison, so much as wanting to support non-polluting and (hopefully) more humane agriculture and pasturing practices.

I don't like the idea of farmworkers being sprayed with pesticides, or chickens stuck in cages all day, or pigs packed into barns, their waste products deluging groundwater and local streams.

Of course, it's also nice if the food I eat doesn't contain a potentially lethal combination of chemicals and additives.

Long ago, I worked at the EPA Office of Pesticide Programs and was horrified to discover three things:

• That pesticides are regulated and tested individually; few, if any, studies at the time were being conducted on how combinations of different pesticides would affect humans. (Some crops used more than one pesticide, but you're also getting exposure to more than one pesticide, usually, when you eat more than one food at a time or in a day, and as a cumulative effect, as well). I'm not sure if this has changed—my assumption is that it has not, at least as an EPA effort.
  
  
• That the pesticide companies themselves are responsible for the tests for safety. The government was not conducting independent tests themselves, that I could tell. All the lab reports submitted to the EPA docket on a particular pesticide were submitted by the manufacturer. Tests were conducted on animals—the worst being, I thought, on dogs whose vocal cords had been cut so the researchers wouldn't have to hear their cries of pain. [I hope this has changed since I was there].
  
  
  
• That most pesticides on the market have been grandfathered in. So, the EPA has to prove that individual pesticides that are questionably safe (and which are already on the market and have been used for years), should be recalled—here's the kicker–using safety studies from the manufacturers themselves. Any talk of recalling a pesticide was sure to bring protests from the farmers already using it (as well as intense lobbying from the manufacturers themselves).
  

But I can't afford to buy all-organic, all the time. So I make choices, sometimes based on what's the least bad non-organic vegetable to buy, sometimes based entirely on budget.

A web site that I've found helpful with this process is the Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce produced by the Environmental Working Group, which lists the commercial (non-organic) fruits and vegetables they've found to be the safest and least safe. The full list is at: http://www.foodnews.org/walletguide.php. An abbreviated/wallet-size guide is also available from this page. I've downloaded it and have added it to all my computerized shopping lists. The page also offers refrigerator magnets and shopping bags with the list printed on it.

In a future post (or posts), I'll discuss some of the other factors I weigh in my decision-making processes at the grocery store. I'd like to hear from other people on what affects their grocery-buying habits. Is it all budget-based, or do you also get little nudges of conscience that help you justify spending $4 for a dozen free-range eggs?