Pesticides, cabbages, and onion sandwiches

Yesterday's musings on the priciness of at least some organic produce reminded me of a very useful guide to pesticides on popular fruits and vegetables, published by the Environmental Working Group. I've listed it before in my Daily Links, but I'm repeating it here in case you missed it. It's a wallet-sized guide to the produce that has the most pesticides (so worth buying organic) down to the ones that have the least (so perhaps worth buying conventional. Read the page and download the PDF from here.

The list strikes me as rather ironic though in one sense. If you take a look, you'll see that a lot of tropical fruit are listed near the bottom of the list, meaning they have less pesticides. However, tropical fruit have to travel quite a long way to get to most of us, so in terms of food miles / Eat Local thinking they are not very good.

And onions, the 'cleanest' produce of them all, is restricted on low-carb diets! So, the only Good Food to eat in winter is, I suppose, organically produced, locally grown, cabbage.

Hmm, I have a sudden urge for a raw onion sandwich on organic sprouted whole grain bread.

Onion sandwich

Slice a large onion very very thinly. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt.

Spread out on slices of a hearty whole grain bread that's been spread with softened butter. Slice into sandwiches. This is best after it's been chilled a bit so the butter hardens.

The late great James Beard used to love onion sandwiches, and served them frequently at cocktail parties.

(Note: I am not actually on a low-carb diet. I don't think I can go there.)