Fresh Isn’t Always Safe: The Real Journey of Produce From Farm Soil to Your Fork

We romanticize fresh produce. Farmers’ markets, vine-picked tomatoes, crisp lettuce, berries still carrying a hint of morning dew — all symbols of purity and nourishment. The message is always the same: eat fresh, eat raw, eat natural.

And that advice isn’t wrong. Fruits and vegetables build immunity, support digestion, fuel our brains, and lower disease risk. But the part we rarely acknowledge is the path they travel before they ever reach a kitchen counter. Fresh produce doesn’t begin life in sanitized grocery bins — it begins in soil, water, wind, trucks, hands, crates, fields, and processing plants.

Somewhere between “grown on a farm” and “washed in your sink,” produce encounters countless environments

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