Synthetic Chemicals in Fruit Products

The pesticides found in fruit products are given in Exhibit 5, and the industrial chemicals are given in Exhibit 6. Fruit products are contaminated with a significant number of diverse insecticides and fungicides. However, several of these pesticides are responsible for the majority of the contamination. Iprodione and its metabolite make up 44.6 percent of the pesticides detected, whereas endosulfan and its by-product (endosulfan sulfate) make up an additional 24.4 percent of the detected pesticides, for a total of 69 percent. The remaining five pesticides are distributed throughout the fruit products. 

Toluene as well as the other industrial chemicals occur primarily in apples, oranges and orange juice, bananas, and raisins. It is assumed that the occurrence of benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, and xylene compounds in these fruit products may be associated with the inactive portion of pesticide formulations or is the result of contacting process equipment. The most frequent occurrence of styrene is in strawberries. This occurrence would be consistent with the ubiquitous plastic wrap or baskets associated with packaging strawberries. 

It can be seen that several fruit products contain banned pesticides. These data suggest that raisins, cantaloupe, and strawberries have the greatest probability of being contaminated with banned pesticides, while some grape, peach, cherry, and prune samples have reported DDE contamination. The vast majority of these fruits were also produced domestically. This means that these pesticides occurred in these products because of past agricultural practices. 

Citrus fruits do not tend to be as contaminated with pesticides as noncitrus fruits. Specifically, all of the citrus fruits and fruit juices are essentially free of endosulfan and iprodione contaminants, yet they are contaminated with ethion which does not occur in noncitrus fruits. 

Another interesting characteristic of the fruit category is that juices tend to be far less contaminated than their parent fruit (i.e., except for pineapple). This suggests that synthetic chemicals remain in the rind or peel of the parent fruit. This is also consistent with canned peaches and pears that have far fewer contaminants than the whole fruit. 

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