Pesticides in Food: What the US Testing Programs Find and What They Miss

If you buy fresh produce at an American grocery store, most of what you’re bringing home has some level of pesticide residue on it. That’s the reality; it’s what the USDA has been finding in its own testing program since 1991. The agency publishes the numbers every year, but what they don’t tell you is what to do with those numbers.

Food is one of four main routes people pick up pesticide exposure from. It’s also the route most people have the most direct control over.

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How residues reach food

Pesticide residue gets onto food through a few different pathways, and they don’t all work the same way. The most obvious one happens during the growing season. Farmers spray chemicals onto leaves, fruit, and soil. Some of those chemicals (the newer neonicotinoid class is the main example) get pulled directly into the plant itself and end up inside the fruit or leaf. Rinsing the outside doesn’t do anything when the chemical is sitting inside the apple.

Drift is the next pathway. Spray from a neighbor’s field, sometimes a mile or more away, can land on a crop that nobody ever sprayed directly. That’s what most of the dicamba lawsuits over the last several years have been about.

Then there’s the use most consumers don’t know about: pre-harvest desiccation. Farmers spray glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) on wheat, oats, barley, and some legume crops in the last few days before harvest. The purpose isn’t to kill weeds. It’s to dry the whole crop evenly so the combine can move through it. By that point in the season, there’s no rain, no irrigation, no time left for the chemical to break down. The residue ends up in products like cereal, bread, oat-based products, and beer.

After the crop is harvested, there’s a whole other set of treatments most people never hear about. Some imported produce gets gassed with fumigants like methyl bromide or phosphine at the port of entry, to kill any insects or fungus before the shipment moves inland. Some fruit gets a wax coating that can seal residue onto the surface. By the time a head of celery hits a grocery store, what’s on and in it reflects choices made by the grower, the shipper, the importer, the retailer, and whatever the EPA’s legal limit allowed at each step.

What the USDA finds

The Pesticide Data Program publishes a summary report each year. The 2024 report, released in January 2026, tested 9,872 samples from 19 commodities of fresh and processed fruits and vegetables, nuts, and fish. About 57.7 percent of samples had detectable pesticide residues (42.3 percent had none). Of the samples that contained detectable pesticides, 38 percent contained more than one pesticide on the same sample, and one cucumber sample alone contained 17 different pesticides (though at levels USDA reports as compliant with EPA’s legal limits). More than 99 percent of samples fell below those legal limits. A small number, 379 samples, were reported as exceeding the limit or containing pesticides with no established tolerance.

The same items show up at the top of the list year after year. Strawberries are usually the worst offender, followed by spinach, kale, and grapes. The USDA’s own framing of its data is that most residues fall below legal limits, so in the agency’s view, there’s no health issue. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) looks at the exact same data and publishes its annual Dirty Dozen list, which is essentially the produce items carrying the most pesticide. The two groups don’t disagree about the numbers. They disagree about what to do about them. The EWG isn’t the only group that disagrees as there are many others.

The FDA runs a separate program (called the Pesticide Residue Monitoring Program) that pays more attention to imported food. The pattern from FDA’s data is consistent: imported produce carries more pesticide residue, more often, especially when it comes in from countries where chemicals banned in the US are still legal to use.

What the legal limits cover

The EPA sets legal limits on how much pesticide residue can be on food. These limits are set chemical-by-chemical and crop-by-crop, based on a calculation: how much could a typical person eat over a lifetime if every relevant food was carrying the maximum legal amount? The math behind that calculation is sound. The problem is what the math doesn’t include.

Those limits are set one chemical at a time. But the food you eat carries a mix of many different pesticides at once, often from the same chemical class. Nobody really knows what those combinations do to a person. A 2018 review in Environmental Health Perspectives and follow-up work from the Mount Sinai Children’s Environmental Health Center argue that current limits don’t take enough account of those combined effects, especially for kids. A child weighs less than an adult and their body is still developing, which means every safety calculation made for an adult body lands harder on a kid.

Europe takes a different approach. The European Food Safety Authority, the EU’s equivalent of the FDA on food safety questions, sets its own limits, and those are often lower than the US numbers for the exact same chemical. The EU has also banned outright several pesticides that are still legal here. The disagreement between the two regulators isn’t about what the science shows. It’s about how cautious to be when the science is incomplete, and the two have answered that question differently.

Washing, peeling, and the limits of both

A 30-second rinse under running water gets some of what’s sitting on the outside of a piece of fruit or a leaf. If you want to remove more, soaking the produce in a baking-soda solution (about a teaspoon per cup of water) for a few minutes has been shown to substantially reduce pesticide residues. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts looked at this specifically with apples and found it pulled off more residue than plain water. Peeling removes whatever was on the surface, but you lose the fiber and most of the nutrients with the peel, so it’s a trade-off.

Here’s the catch with all of this: washing only works for what’s on the outside. Some pesticides (the neonicotinoid class is the main one) get absorbed by the plant itself and end up inside the fruit, the leaves, and even the pollen. No amount of rinsing pulls those out. The same goes for fungicides that get into a plant through its roots, and for glyphosate residues they end up inside a grain of wheat instead of on the husk.

So washing helps for some chemicals and does nothing for others. The frustrating part is that there’s no way to tell which is which by looking at a piece of fruit. That’s where the organic food comes in.

Organic versus conventional

One of the clearest findings in pesticide research: when people switch from conventional to organic produce, the amount of pesticide showing up in their urine drops within days. Researchers at the University of California Berkeley ran a study where families ate their usual groceries for a week, then switched to organic for one or two weeks. The pesticide markers in the kids’ urine dropped by 60 to 90 percent on the organic weeks. The biggest drops were for organophosphates, an older type of insecticide with a long record of brain-development problems in children.

The finding holds up across multiple research teams using different study designs. Pesticide research often produces conflicting results, but on this specific question (does eating organic lower the amount of pesticide in your body?), direct experiments, blood-and-urine measurements, and large population studies all reach the same conclusion: organic food carries less pesticide residue, and eating it lowers the amount of pesticide in your body within days.

The USDA Organic label is what “organic” means in US law. Synthetic pesticides aren’t allowed under those rules. There’s a short list of substances that are allowed in organic farming, and organic doesn’t mean residue-free. It means a different set of chemicals applied under different rules. Testing shows organic produce carries fewer pesticides at lower amounts. Not zero.

For shoppers who specifically want to avoid glyphosate, the Glyphosate Residue Free certification tests for it directly. The EWG Verified label looks at a broader set of ingredients beyond just pesticides. The Non-GMO Project seal addresses whether the crop itself was genetically modified. Each label checks for something different, so they can layer on top of each other.

Where switching moves the needle

So which produce items make the biggest difference if you swap them for organic? The answer is on EWG’s Dirty Dozen list, and the USDA’s own residue rankings tell the same story.

Berries are the worst. You eat the skin, you only wash them briefly, and they’re grown with heavy pesticide use. Leafy greens come right after. Stone fruit (peaches, plums, cherries), grapes, and bell peppers are also on the list. At the other end of the spectrum are the items that don’t carry as much residue: onions, avocados, pineapples, sweet corn, cabbage. Mostly because there’s a thick skin or husk that gets pulled off before you eat what’s inside.

So here’s the practical move. You don’t need to buy everything organic. Swap the top five or six items on the heavy-residue list and leave the rest conventional. Paying extra for organic onions when you’re already paying extra for organic strawberries isn’t going to lower your pesticide intake by much.

What is on the regulatory horizon

The biggest federal fight right now is over the 2026 Farm Bill. Pesticide manufacturers pushed for language that would stop states from setting their own pesticide labeling rules. That was essentially an attempt to block lawsuits over things like failure to warn about cancer risk. The House version passed in April 2026 without that language, after a successful amendment stripped it out. The Senate hasn’t produced its own version yet, and the whole thing could still get revived. Most of the fight has centered on glyphosate, where the underlying lawsuits have been playing out and the regulatory disagreement is loudest.

States are moving on their own. California’s Proposition 65 law requires warning labels on products containing several pesticides, including glyphosate. Hawaii became the first state to ban chlorpyrifos outright in 2018, and the same law created 100-foot no-spray zones around schools for all restricted-use pesticides. California phased in its own chlorpyrifos ban in 2020, and New York followed in 2021. Several other states are looking at the same approach.

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About This Page

This page is reviewed periodically as new research emerges. Content reflects current scientific understanding of toxin-related health topics.

Last reviewed: June 2026