Apples are some of the most heavily sprayed fruit you can buy. In order to get them large and perfect fungicides and pesticides are generously used so we can have our cinderella perfect apples. A trend I have notice this year is a lot of farmers are doing low spray or no spray apples. The result is that you are finding a lot of smaller uglier apples, but they taste great and cook up perfectly. I bought 5 different types of apples from a farm stand yesterday that had a sign saying that they were doing low to no spray on there apples because it was better for the farmers health and the health of the person eating the apple. To organic farmer stands do no spray and it's amazing to see the difference - the organic no spray apples really look pretty beat up and are small. These ones pictured above are the middle ground apples. Smaller with some blemishes not perfect like the sprayed ones not really small and marked liked the no spray ones.
next time you are at the market keep an eye out for these apples. It is something of a challenge to buy fruit that we are so used to seeing one way "perfect" and then realizing what it takes to make them that way and how they look in their natural state.
No matter how you look at it pesticides are not anyones friends and if we can get over wanting apples to look a certain way and instead focus on flavor and health we will be better off.
I spoke to the farmer I bought these from and asked if they were a hard sell. She just shrugged and said: Yeah some people don't like the way they look and go somewhere else.
At least now we have a choice.
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1 comment:
This is very helpful, but what I really need is a list of low/no spray sources in Connecticut
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