“Pesticides are within safety limits, you don’t need to wash your produce!” That phrase gets repeated a lot. But here is what the data actually shows. The USDA’s annual Pesticide Data Program tests thousands of fruit and vegetable samples every year. In their most recent reports, over 70 percent of conventional produce contained detectable pesticide residues, and many samples had residues from multiple chemicals at once. The EPA sets a safety limit for each chemical individually, but those limit