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Fruits and veggies can have a pretty significant pesticide load, depending on how they're grown. Synthetic fertilizers can be found in almost equal amounts. When both come from synthetic -- i.e. petroleum -- sources, that can pump up the environmental footprint of the fruits and veggies you eat pretty quickly. But it doesn't have to.
In a recent column, Slate.com's Green Lantern was asked for advice about how to determine such a footprint. While beef and other foods with lots of environmentally expensive inputs -- animals, largely -- have received the bulk of the footprint-reduction attention, that doesn't mean that fruits and veggies and other vegetarian fare should be left out.
It does mean that a lot of the rules of thumb that apply to other green foods are mostly applicable here, which is a green angle that the Green Lantern doesn't really address. So here are a few rules of thumb to use when pondering the footprint of your fruits and veggies.
Look at the labels
This is probably the easiest place to start, at least when shopping in a grocery store or co-op. Food labels will give you two valuable pieces of information: How and where it was grown. When it comes to fruits and veggies, if it doesn't have a 9 at the front of the PLU code, it wasn't grown organically; that means it's likely been hosed down with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or other undesirables designed to keep the fruit or veggie looking shiny and clean. That also means that it has a significantly higher environmental footprint, since those pesticides had to all be produced, shipped, and deployed on the fruit before it got to you.
It's a similar story when it comes to fertilizers. Certain organic fertilizers are allowed with organic produce, and, while some are synthetic -- and, as such, require manufacture and transport, and so forth -- many can be produced locally to the farm (like compost, and manure) and have a negligible impact on your food's environmental footprint. So, with a few exceptions (more below), you can go organic, and shrink the footprint of your desired fruit or vegetable without really worrying about the environmental impact of the pesticides used on your food -- they aren't there.
Where your food is grown should also be apparent. If the sticker won't tell you, a nearby sign (or a helpful produce department employee) should be able to. If it's close by, that often indicates that it's in season, along with the obvious information about how far it's traveled, which all adds up to two thumbs up for low impact. Anything that involves a different time zone, continent, or hemisphere will crank up the impact of that produce, no matter how it was grown, so by going local and organic, you take a remarkable amount of the guesswork out of the process.
Know thy food source
Okay, you're saying. That works great when I shop at the grocery store, but what about at the farmers' market? There aren't as many stickers and signs on everything. So true, and that's a good thing -- truth be told, shopping at farmers' markets, and other direct farm-to-table sources, are the greener way to go, across the board. Rather than having to trust that little sticker, you can just speak directly to the farmer who grew the food. Ask him or her about the pesticide load of those raspberries; it might be 20.2 pounds of chemicals per acre, as it's reported by the Pesticide Action Network in California. But if you're buying sustainably farmed foods, it isn't; figure that out, and it doesn't really matter what the average is in California. And, as a bonus, you can often arrange to go visit said farmer, to see the operation, and your food growing, in action. Any lingering doubts about the lack of a sticker should be quickly erased.
In the meantime, study up on the water footprint of the fruits and veggies in season near you, and you'll have all the necessary tools to figure out the environmental impact of your fruits and veggies.
