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Do You *Really* Need to Wash Fruit Before You Eat It? - Popular Mechanics
It's literally just running it under tap water for two seconds. What does that do?!?!
It turns out, washing your fruits and vegetables really might help.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that you wash your produce to avoid food-borne illnesses like norovirus, which is the country's leading cause of disease outbreaks from contaminated food. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, and diarrhea.
Apparently, experts agree that rinsing your fruits and vegetables really is effective in this regard. In doing so, you wash away physical contaminants like dirt, pebbles, insects, and other lingering debris. (Anecdotally, I can say a lot of my produce comes coated in stuff I wouldn't want to eat — like the little green worm I recently found coiled in the wrinkle of a kale leaf.)
Take, for instance, green onions. "They're like little straws — when you pull them out of the ground, it's so easy for dirt to get down in there," says Drew Patterson, culinary director of the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and ServSafe instructor. Washing away that dirt could potentially prevent you from getting sick: "You could get a food-borne illness if you eat a little chunk of dirt that happened to have a live strain of bacteria in it," he says.
It's literally just running it under tap water for two seconds. What does that do?!?!
It turns out, washing your fruits and vegetables really might help.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that you wash your produce to avoid food-borne illnesses like norovirus, which is the country's leading cause of disease outbreaks from contaminated food. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, and diarrhea.
Apparently, experts agree that rinsing your fruits and vegetables really is effective in this regard. In doing so, you wash away physical contaminants like dirt, pebbles, insects, and other lingering debris. (Anecdotally, I can say a lot of my produce comes coated in stuff I wouldn't want to eat — like the little green worm I recently found coiled in the wrinkle of a kale leaf.)
Take, for instance, green onions. "They're like little straws — when you pull them out of the ground, it's so easy for dirt to get down in there," says Drew Patterson, culinary director of the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and ServSafe instructor. Washing away that dirt could potentially prevent you from getting sick: "You could get a food-borne illness if you eat a little chunk of dirt that happened to have a live strain of bacteria in it," he says.