[Text and picture/Excerpted from "Cleaning vegetables correctly and removing agricultural medicine shadows" published by Shang and Zhou dynasties, author Yang Ruihong]

Q: Washing with Xiaosu or vinegar can neutralize agricultural medicine. It seems to make sense. Is it true?

A: Xiao Su beating and vinegar, one is singular and the other is acidic. The following are explained separately:

Xiao Su beating, also known as Sophora powder, is called chemical name NaHCO3, which produces carbon dioxide in water. Therefore, it is often used as a swelling agent in food production, and because it is weakly singular, it is also commonly used to neutralize the acidity in food. Since sausage is often added to food, some consumers believe that cleaning fruits and vegetables should be safer than using cleaners.

In fact, many acidic agricultural medicines (such as organic phosphorus) degrade faster in a singular environment. For example, malathion is at pH 5, and the semi-degradation cycle (half the time required for agricultural degradation, DT50) is about 107 days, and the semi-degradation cycle at pH 7 is only six days left, and the semi-degradation cycle at pH 9 is only half a day.

It seems that it can accelerate degradation, but you might as well think about it carefully. Even in a pH 9 singular environment, it takes half a day (twelve hours) to degrade half. Generally, we clean fruits and vegetables for up to ten minutes. Therefore, using Xiao Su to accelerate the degradation of agricultural medicines, the actual effect is not clear. Moreover, if the drug is something other than stable in the senile environment, does it not mean that the time required for degradation is increased? Secondly, Xiaosu baking has different levels of medicine, consumption and industrial use. Once the more difficult Xiaosu baking powder is used, it will increase the chance of dyeing fruits and vegetables.

As for cleaning with vinegar, taking the above-mentioned marathon as an example, it will prolong the degradation time of organic phosphorus. Moreover, after cleaning with vinegar, the taste of vinegar will remain on the fruits and vegetables, and will also affect the flavor of food.

Therefore, neither is better than washing with clean water.

Point

Use small sorbet or vinegar as a cleaning agent, and the effect may not be better than washing with clean water.