Dinner Diva: How to properly wash fruits and veggies

Unless you have grown a fruit or vegetable yourself, in your own organic veggie patch, I would hope that you’re giving your produce a good thorough wash before eating it.

There are a couple of good reasons why you should be washing your fruits and vegetables- even organic produce.

First of all, you really don’t know where that food has been. There can be nasty little bacteria critters in the soil that grows your food, the water that is used to hydrate the plants, on the hands of the people who harvest your food, on the hands of the super market workers who put the foods out to be sold, in the grocery cart you place the foods in, on your hands when you take the foods out of their bags and so on and so forth. Ingesting this bacteria could quite possibly lead to food poisoning and nobody wants that.

Then there are the chemicals. If you’re buying foods that are not organic, you definitely need to clean them well before putting them in your mouth. And I don’t mean just giving a quick rinse under the tap. You need to give that food a seriously good scrub.

How to properly wash fruits and vegetables

The folks at the FDA suggest that running water over your fruits and veggies, and using a brush to scrub cucumbers and melons and other tougher skinned foods is all you need to do to prepare your produce. But I think we need to go a tad further than that by cleaning our produce with a simple homemade fruit and veggie wash.

All you need is a solution of water and white vinegar – equal parts – and a regular old spray bottle.

For soft skinned veggies and fruits, soak them in the solution of vinegar and water for a couple of minutes and then give them a good rinse. For hard-skinned veggies and fruits, spritz them with the solution of vinegar and water, rub that solution in with a scrub brush, and rinse.

This combo of vinegar and water works to dissolve any pesticides and/or waxy residue from the skins of your produce.

You can find commercial products that will do the same thing, but I personally like to just mix up my own fruit and veggie wash.

Leanne Ely is a NYT bestselling author and the creator of SavingDinner.com, the original menu planning website, bringing families back to the dinner table for over 15 years.