The most important thing to understand about pesticide residue data is that detection sensitivity has improved by orders of magnitude while the tolerances have not moved. Instruments that once found things at parts per million now find them at parts per billion. That means detection rates go up over time even when actual residue levels go down.
If you read “99% of strawberry samples contained pesticide residue” without that context, you will draw a conclusion the data does not support.
Three different numbers
Detection frequency. The share of samples where any residue was found at all, at whatever level the instrument can measure. This is the number that produces alarming headlines, and on its own it says nothing about quantity.
Proximity to benchmark. The share of samples where a residue reached some meaningful fraction of its legal limit. This site uses 1% of the EPA benchmark as a threshold, which is deliberately conservative — it flags samples at a hundredth of the enforcement level.
Above tolerance. The share of samples that actually exceeded the legal limit. Across the U.S. monitoring program this consistently runs under 1%, and in most years well under.
A commodity can have a 99% detection rate and a 0.8% above-tolerance rate at the same time. Both numbers are true and they mean very different things.
What a tolerance is
A tolerance is the maximum amount of a specific pesticide legally permitted on a specific crop. It is not a line between safe and poisonous. It is set by taking the level at which no adverse effect was observed in toxicology testing and then dividing by a safety factor — typically 100, sometimes more where children’s exposure is a concern.
So a sample at 50% of tolerance is not “half poisonous”. It is at roughly a two-hundredth of the no-observed-effect level, before accounting for the fact that the tolerance also assumes a lifetime of daily consumption at that level.
The EPA’s own framing is worth quoting in substance: the presence of a detectable residue does not mean the food is unsafe to eat.
So why rank commodities at all?
Because you still have to decide where a limited organic budget goes, and “everything is below tolerance” does not help you make that decision.
Ranking on relative evidence answers a different, narrower question: given that you are going to spend $20 a week on organic, which foods return the largest measurable reduction? That is a budgeting question. It does not require the residues to be dangerous, only that they are measurable and that they differ between the organic and conventional supply.
This is why the scores on this site are called relative pesticide residue evidence and organic upgrade priority, and not danger score, toxicity score, or safety rating. The naming is deliberate, and we will not change it.
The risk that is actually well established
There is one nutrition risk in this whole area with strong, consistent evidence behind it: not eating enough fruit and vegetables.
That is the failure mode to guard against. A shopper who reads a pesticide ranking, concludes that strawberries and spinach are dangerous, and buys neither has made their diet measurably worse in exchange for avoiding an exposure whose harm at these levels has not been demonstrated.
If the organic version is out of reach, buy the conventional one. That is the correct answer, and it is not a compromise.
What washing does and does not do
Washing removes surface residue and soil. It does not remove systemic compounds that the plant took up through its roots and distributed through its tissue — no rinse reaches those.
Thirty seconds of plain running water with gentle rubbing is the practical benchmark. Soap is not recommended for produce, vinegar solutions have not shown a consistent advantage worth the effort, and commercial produce washes have not been shown to outperform water by a margin that justifies the price. Details, by food type.
How to read this site
- The pesticide map shows relative evidence against nutrient density. The top-left quadrant is not “safe” and the bottom-right is not “dangerous” — they are cheap wins and expensive ones.
- Sample counts are shown on every food page. Small sample sets get less weight, and below 50 conventional samples we decline to rank at all.
- Where a commodity has no organic sample set, the verdict is insufficient data, not a guess.
Frequently asked
›Does a pesticide detection mean food is unsafe?
No. The EPA states explicitly that detecting a residue does not mean a food is at an unsafe level. Modern instruments detect at parts per billion, often thousands of times below the tolerance set for that compound on that crop, and monitoring consistently finds more than 99% of samples below those tolerances.
›What is an EPA tolerance?
A tolerance is the maximum residue of a specific pesticide legally allowed on a specific food. It is set with safety margins built in — typically a hundredfold below the level at which no effect was observed in toxicology studies — and it functions as an enforcement threshold, not a cliff edge between safe and dangerous.
Last reviewed 2026-05.