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Are Cut, Raw Onions Poisonous?

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Are Cut, Raw Onions Poisonous?

"โ€œThere is no validity [to this myth] at all,โ€ Ellen Steinberg, PhD, R.D., L.D., food safety specialist, told me. For starters, the chemical makeup of onions just doesnโ€™t support bacteria growth, she explained. Their low pH (i.e. acidic nature) and low protein content mean they are not an ideal breeding ground for germs, viruses or other pathogens. In fact, the opposite is true: onions contain compounds that have antibacterial properties."

Grocery Stores Get Mostly Mediocre Scores On Their Food Waste Efforts

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Grocery Stores Get Mostly Mediocre Scores On Their Food Waste Efforts

"Any dumpster diver can tell you: Grocery stores throw away a lot of food. But food discarded off the shelf is just one way that grub gets trashed. There's other waste along a grocery store's supply chain ยโ€”rejected crops at farms, for example ยโ€” that's often overlooked. So The Center for Biological Diversity and The "Ugly" Fruit and Veg Campaign recently asked the 10 largest U.S. supermarkets how they handle food waste, and gave each store's efforts a letter grade."

"Scores for each store appeared in the report, "Supermarkets Fail to Make the Grade in Reducing Food Waste," released Monday. Letter grades took three overarching categories into account: how much public information a store shared about food waste, what it was doing to prevent food waste, and where its discarded food went. No store got an A. Walmart ranked highest with a B. Kroger, Albertsons and Ahold Delhaize, the parent company that owns Food Lion and Stop & Shop, all got Cs. Costco, Publix, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Target all got Ds, and the German-based discount grocer ALDI got an F."

Your Organic Food Is Treated With Pesticides, Too

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Your Organic Food Is Treated With Pesticides, Too

"Organic farmers may use pesticides, so long as they choose from a list of approved options. The USDA organic program does not disallow all pesticides, just โ€œsyntheticโ€ ones. (By the way, the term โ€œpesticidesโ€ includes both bug sprays and weed killers.)"

"So what remains on our vegetables? The USDA periodically tests produce for pesticide residues; this is the Pesticide Data Program. (The EWG repurposes this data to create their Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists.) But the USDA does not test for the presence of organic-allowed pesticides. So the EWG is reporting the stuff on conventional crops without considering whatโ€™s present on organic crops."

"So, will you lower your pesticide exposure by switching to organic? We donโ€™t know, but the answer may very well be no. Even looking at the synthetic, non-organic pesticides in the USDAโ€™s tests, conventional crops donโ€™t always have the lowest amounts. Take strawberries, for example, the โ€œdirtiestโ€ item on the 2018 list: 75 percent of organic strawberries, and 76 percent of conventional strawberries, had pesticide levels that were under 5 percent of the allowable levels. "