What Conventional Crops are Best (and Worst)?

I keep a "dirty dozen" magnet on my refrigerator from the Environmental Working Group that tells me which fruits and vegetables are sprayed with the most pesticides, and which are the cleanest. It's a good key for figuring out which foods to always buy organic, but that isn't the only consideration to take into account when grocery shopping. Other environmental impacts, like fertilizer use and greenhouse gas emissions, that are equally important. 

According to an article on Slate.com, "Some crops make more efficient use of the land than others, so their environmental impacts may be less intense on per-calorie basis." So Slate writer Brandon Borrell ran the numbers on a handful of crops, calculating the environmental impacts of the crops on a per-calorie basis, and found that white rice, sweet corn and onions are among the most environmentally friendly crops, while strawberries are the worst.

Borrell waffles on whether organic production of agronomic crops like corn, soy and rice is more environmentally friendly, but he acknowledges that "for fruits and vegetables, going organic is the eco-friendly choice."

The article closes with this:

"For all this, one of the simplest ways to ballpark the impact of a conventionally grown fruit or vegetable is to glance at its price. The trick doesn't always work, but, in general, the cheaper one probably required less fertilizer, pesticide, land, and energy."

That's an interesting theory, and one that I hadn't heard before. Of course it wouldn't hold true for organic foods and federally subsidized crops like corn, but for conventional fruits and veggies, it makes some sense.

-Mark