Mommy Greenest

Yes, you can get away with just buying organic milk and meat products. Yes, an organic apple is twice as expensive as conventional. Yes, there’s a reason they call it Whole Paycheck.

But then you come face to face with the truth: Unless you’re buying organic, your food is full of chemicals that are banned in other countries because they’re dangerous to our health.

The Pesticide Action Network’s new WhatsOnMyFood website is a revolutionary resource that makes this fact undeniably clear. Created with information from the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program cross-referenced with data from Environmental Protection Agency (among others), WhatsOnMyFood.org is destined to do to grocery shopping what the Skin Deep Database did to beauty product perusal.

Scroll down their list of common foods—from almonds to watermelon—and click on your favorites to pop up a list of pesticides and information on their toxicity. Like the aforementioned apple, which presents the residue of 14 different pesticides such as dimethoate, a carcinogen, hormone disruptor, neurotoxin and developmental (or reproductive) toxicant. Or blueberries, which can include a record 48 different pesticides in each tiny little globe.

You can also search by pesticide, such as Atrazine, a cancer-causing chemical that it’s banned in Europe, but so widely used in the United States that it’s found in 71% of our drinking water. Or check out water-cooler facts such as: Apples can be sprayed up to 16 times with 26 different chemicals, just a few of the 400 pesticides that are legal in the U.S.

In fact, according to Pesticide Action Network, “Pesticide regulations in the U.S. are well behind much of the rest of the industrialized world.” In a country that represents more wealth per capita than most others, how can this be possible? PAN cites agrichemical corporations with serious pull in Washington, for starters, but also because “pesticide regulation in the U.S. does not adequately account for things like additive and synergistic effects.”

Huh? Basically, what this means is that the EPA regulates chemicals on an individual basis, rather than considering the cumulative effects the mixture of pesticides that the average American ingests each day.

And here’s what all of this means to parents: The average child gets five or more servings of pesticides in their food and water every day. According to the Department of Health & Human Services, organophosphate pesticides are now found in the blood of 95% of Americans tested, with levels twice as high in blood samples taken from children. Exposure to organophosphate pesticides are linked to hyperactivity, behavior disorders, learning disabilities, developmental delays and motor dysfunction.

And we wonder why our kids are having problems in school.

Parents, please feed your children organic food. I know it’s more expensive. I know times are tough. But think about that $4 Starbuck’s latte you ordered yesterday. Or that lunchtime sandwich you could have brown-bagged. Cut out a few weekly splurges of your own to make up the difference in grocery bills for your family. But please don’t cut costs when it comes to your kids.