Updated July 29, 2017
Posted July 29, 2017
By Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
What says Jersey in July more than a Garden State blueberry?
Its sweet, tart purple pop is as much a part of summer as peaches, beaches and lightning bugs.
New Jersey’s state fruit is a longtime favorite, but the market for organic blueberries is particularly ripe, strengthened by a growing number of customers who don’t mind forking over the extra money — often at least a dollar more — for fruit grown in an environment free of most synthetic pesticides and fertilizers.
The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit that compiles information on potentially harmful chemicals and pesticides in food and consumer products, maintains a list of 48 fruits and vegetables for which the group analyzes pesticide residue testing data from the USDA. Domestic blueberries were ranked as the 17th most contaminated type of produce. Imported blueberries followed close behind, at No. 20 (strawberries and spinach, at No. 1 and 2, are the worst offenders).
But ever pull up to the supermarket to find it’s clean out of organic blueberries? Or, when you do find them, do you ever notice that not many have been grown here?
The Organic Trade Association says in 2016, 13.6 percent of all fruits and vegetables bought in the U.S. were organic, with sales for all organic products in the country reaching almost $50 billion in 2016, way up from from $3.6 billion in 1997.
https://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2017/07/blueberries_new_jersey_2017_organic.html
