1. Meats: These are high on the food chain, and thus can concentrate toxins from the animal’s diets in their fatty tissues. 
   
2. Dairy products: Also high on the food chain and rich in fats, which is where harmful chemicals become stored.
   
3. Fish: While not strictly organic, it is critical to buy wild fish and avoid all farmed fish which can contain high levels of contaminants.  Hint: All “Atlantic salmon” is farmed, as this fish is virtually extinct in the wild.
   
4. Berries: Strawberries, raspberries and other berries including grapes, and other crops grown close to the ground and with a thin absorbent skin that you eat tend to contact and absorb more chemicals.
   
5. Salad Crops: Lettuce, spinach and celery are highly sprayed, and have no outer shell to protect the part you eat - the leaf.
   
6. Mushrooms: Mushrooms are highly absorbent, and conventional growing uses powerful fungicides to keep stray species from invading the intended crop.
   
7. Root Crops: Conventional potatoes, yams, carrots, onions and other root crops can be sprayed with fungicides as well as pesticides and the parts you eat grow in direct contact with the chemicals.
   
8. Bananas: Banana plantations use up to 20 times more pesticides per acre than crops grown in industrialized countries.  Conventional bananas are often grown with a blue plastic bag of pesticides placed over the soft, absorbent skin of the fruit.  Enough said? 
   
9. Waxed Fruit: That shiny apple has a wax coating that locks in the pesticides and makes them very difficult to wash off.
   
10. Coffee and Tea: Technically not “foods”, but hot water brewing can concentrate the many pesticides used in the growing process while it is extracting the “good stuff”.  Remember to use an unbleached filter and to avoid the Styrofoam cup like a plague!

If you can’t go organic all at once, begin buying high-priority organic foods when you can.  Organic food also contains higher levels of key nutrients, so you will be improving your nutrition while reducing your intake of pesticides and herbicides.

You can also find good, healthy food for much lower prices at your local farmer’s market. It may not be officially labeled “organic,” but if you talk to the sellers, you’ll find much local produce is grown without pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilizers.

Look for foods that are minimally packaged, since packaging of food alone accounts for 6 percent of the U.S. energy consumption, not to speak of the impact of packaging on landfills.