LOVE your ORGANIC fruit and vegetables... Tips for buying ORGANIC on a budget.

When I take a fruit salad or a fruit platter to someone’s house, I’m often asked where we buy our fruit. A few years ago, I found a website that delivers certified organic fruit, vegetables and groceries to your home. The quality and taste is just amazing... We’re totally hooked!!!

We place our order by Friday afternoon, it is picked and or packed over the weekend and on Tuesday it arrives at our front doorstep, FRESH and DELICIOUS as can be. My eldest gets so excited when it arrives (especially if strawberries are involved). The fruit and veg are all seasonal, so you know that it’s fresh and you are getting maximum nutrition. LOVE it!!! There’s also a great variety of grocery items available, as well as seeds for the garden and loads of other fabulous things.

We also use a service that delivers a box of seasonal chemical-free or organic produce that is locally sourced from within 200km of our home. This one is a little like a lucky dip. I LOVE that it forces us to eat vege's that are out of our normal selection! It expands our nutritional intake and motivates me to get more creative in the kitchen. Last week we received brussels sprouts, which due to my Mum’s awful taste experiences as a child, I’d never actually eaten one before. I had no idea what to do with them, so thankfully they arrived with a recipe. Turns out that I LOVE brussels sprouts baked in a little olive oil, sea salt and some rosemary from the garden...Yum! With this service there’s a dashboard where you can add extra’s to your box such as bread, eggs, an amazing array of flours, or just some more fruit and veg!!

Do we buy everything organic? Well, no…… For our family buying 100% organic food all the time, is simply not accessible or sometimes even affordable. So what do we do? Well, we follow the EWG’s Clean 15 and Dirty Dozen list as a guide. This guide lists the 12 most sprayed fruits and veg, and the 15 least sprayed fruit and veg. It can help you decide how to best spend your fruit and veg money whilst limiting your family’s exposure to possible pesticide residues.

Since discovering this guide a few years back, it has truly been an invaluable resource for me! Since discovering the above two delivery services, our fruit in particular tastes so much more DELICIOUS that we are eating way more of it. We’ve had less colds and flu’s and for me personally, I've never felt better (even whilst wrangling two little kids)!

So, how do we use the EWG’s guide? Well….

* If it’s on the dirty dozen list, we buy it organic 99.9% of the time, or we grow it in our vege patch. We actually have a section of our garden dedicated to green smoothies; it’s full of kale, spinach and pak choy. Our kids think it’s awesome fun to pick their own greens to make a smoothie with. We have regular green moustaches in our household!!

* If it’s on the clean 15 list, we buy it organic if it’s well priced, or we buy it from our local fruit market. We're so lucky to have a really GREAT local market that's very focused on local seasonal produce! So, if we are tight on cash, we eat the clean 15 from our local market more heavily to stretch our grocery budget further. 

* So, what if it’s not on either list?  I will still buy organic if it's available and affordable. Why?... As I believe that it sends a clear message that I support healthier and more eco-friendly farming practices. The more people demand organic choices, the more prevalent they will become!

Please, always keep in mind that eating fruit and veg that is conventionally grown, (even if it’s on the dirty dozen list) is ALWAYS better than eating no fruit and veg at all! Additionally, did you know that pesticide levels typically diminish with cooking? So if you do have non-organic produce from the dirty dozen list, I'd actually consider cooking it instead of eating it raw! I was so surprised to learn this from EWG a while back, what a fabulous tip..... 

Note: EWG’s guide is based on American testing results. So it’s possible that the results may be slightly different if the same tests were done on Australian produce. However, I still believe that the list is a good indication and worth taking into account when shopping in Australia and other countries outside the USA. How have I come to this conclusion? Well, when I look at the fruit and veg on the clean 15 list and see avocado, it makes sense to me as avocado has a thick skin that would be hard for pests to penetrate. Asparagus, which is another member of the clean 15, grows so quickly that pests would have little time to attack it. Yet on the dirty dozen list we have: Strawberries, thin skinned and very easy for insects to attack and Spinach where I know in my garden, the snails, slugs and other bugs all LOVE my spinach, so it makes perfect sense to me that strawberries and spinach would be heavily sprayed!

I've really LOVED having this resource to help me make informed FRUIT and VEGE choices!!

You can get the EWG Clean 15 and Dirty Dozen guide here: www.ewg.org/foodnews

Here are the fruit and veg delivery services we use:

www.lettucedeliver.com.au (Sydney based)

www.ooooby.org (Currently have bases in Sydney, Auckland, and Fresno USA. The following locations are coming soon: Melbourne, Wellington, Seattle USA and Panama City.)

I LOVE both these delivery services, as the produce is sooo SUPER FRESH. It doesn’t get stored for long periods of time in a freezer or fridge, it doesn’t sit on a supermarket shelf for a week before you buy it. It’s fresh from the farm that grew it! I rarely have to compost any un-eaten fruit and veg these days…. they are so fresh when they arrive, that they are well and truly eaten before they go off!!

Had you heard about the Dirty Dozen and Clean 15 before? Pop me a comment and let me know…. I would LOVE to know where you buy your most DELICIOUS fruit and vege’s from too! xxx