The Government's Reply on Forever Chemicals in Food Left Out the Pesticides Sprayed on Fruit

Nick Mole is a policy officer at Pesticide Action Network UK, a campaigning group that has spent decades arguing about what gets sprayed on food. On 9 April 2024 his organisation published what it had found inside the government's own residue testing results. Ten pesticides that meet the international definition of a forever chemical were present in a range of fruit and vegetables, PAN UK reported from those government samples. Grapes, cherries, spinach and tomatoes were among them. Strawberries came out worst: 95% of the 120 samples tested in 2022 carried at least one, and of the 55 samples of British-grown strawberries, 91% did.¹

PAN UK added one more detail: the farmer holding the sprayer is generally unaware too, because the label carries no such information.¹ Mole said UK consumers were being "left with no choice but to ingest these chemicals."¹ The programme that produced those numbers is the government's own.⁵

The problem underneath it is simple. Some of the pesticides licensed for spraying on fruit are forever chemicals, and the government's answer to Parliament about forever chemicals in food was about fish, eggs, milk and vegetables. The licensed spray was left out of it.

Forever chemicals reach food through farming, a scientist told MPs

On 25 June 2025, Dr Joanna Cloy gave evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee in Room 8 of the Palace of Westminster. Cloy is a senior project manager at Fidra, an environmental charity, and her own work is on sewage sludge. The committee was opening an inquiry into forever chemicals. One of the MPs asked the witnesses where exposure comes from.

Cloy took the question to the land. "In the UK, around 80% of biosolids are applied to agricultural land, so the food that people are eating potentially has PFAS that have bioaccumulated in them, and that is also the case with livestock," she said.² Biosolids are the solid matter left after wastewater treatment, spread on fields as fertiliser. The MPs later wrote that biosolids can carry these chemicals from household and industrial sources.³

They put the finding in their own words: these chemicals can enter the food chain through agricultural processes. The Nature Friendly Farming Network told the same MPs that farmers are involuntary recipients of them through inputs such as pesticides, often unlabelled, unscreened organic materials, contaminated water sources, and, most significantly, sewage sludge.³

Cloy raised a second thing in the same session. Biosolids cannot be used for organic production, she said, and this class of pesticide will not be used on it either. She also named the socioeconomic divides in "being able to afford organic food produce."²

MPs asked the government to limit forever chemicals from farming; the reply left pesticides out

Toby Perkins is the Labour MP for Chesterfield and chairs that committee. On 15 April 2026 its members read and agreed the report paragraph by paragraph, and ordered their Chair to make it to the House. It was published eight days later. At paragraph 77 it asks the government to set limits on the levels and types of forever chemicals permitted in food. That should include, it says, "establishing and monitoring limits on PFAS entering the food chain through agricultural processes."³ The government replied on 15 June 2026, and the reply was published on 6 July.⁴

Across the whole reply, the words pesticide, residue, fruit and crop do not appear.⁴

That is not the same as doing nothing. The reply says maximum levels for these chemicals in food will be considered once the Committee on Toxicity publishes its review. It describes the Food Standards Agency working with the National Reference Laboratory to strengthen testing "across a range of everyday foods such as fish, eggs, milk and vegetables."⁴ A great deal is being done. The fruit and the spray are outside it.

A fungicide sprayed on fruit meets the official forever-chemical definition, and a substantial share survives washing

Fludioxonil is a fungicide used to stop fruit rotting. It appears 160 times in the UK's published residue results for 2024. That file records, for each sample, the product, the country it came from, the shop that sold it, the level found and the legal limit.⁵

The OECD's 2021 definition set a test of structure. Danger is a separate question. A chemist applying it looks through a molecule for one carbon whose hydrogens have all been replaced by fluorine: a -CF3 or -CF2- group with no hydrogen, chlorine, bromine or iodine attached to it.⁶ One such carbon is enough, whatever else the molecule contains. Fludioxonil has one.

It is not the indestructible sort. On a sunlit soil surface it breaks down in a week or two. Roelans and four co-authors gathered the studies published between 2012 and 2025 into a review that appeared in PeerJ in 2026. The studies it collects turn on depth. Below the surface, out of the light, the half-life runs from months to a year or more, and in water longer still. Sunlight, they argue, changes the molecule into something else instead of removing it, and the something else is what deserves attention.⁷ They record a plainer property too. The compound repels water, so washing lifts some of it and a substantial share stays on the fruit until it is eaten.⁷

EFSA's assessors got part of the way. In 2024 they concluded that fludioxonil meets the EU criteria for an endocrine disruptor, a substance that interferes with hormone systems. On another question they stopped: the consumer dietary risk assessment, their report records, "could not be finalised."⁸

As of July 2026, no UK or EU regulator has published an estimate of how much of a person's total forever-chemical intake comes from this route, and one reason lies one step upstream. When EFSA's experts added up how much of these chemicals people take in from food, they worked with four legacy industrial chemicals, set a weekly limit for them, and named fruit among the places they are found. This fungicide is not one of the four.⁹ If that sum were done and the number came back small, the practical advice would change. The distance between the two plans would not.

The law allows almost no pesticide in baby food, and hundreds of times more on the same fruit sold as fruit

European law, carried into British law, already says what the strict answer looks like. Processed cereal-based baby food may not contain residues of any individual pesticide above 0.01 mg/kg.¹⁰ That is near enough to none. The same fruit carries a different number depending on which shelf it sells from. In British law the limit for fludioxonil is 4 mg/kg on strawberries and 5 mg/kg on apples and pears, in force since August 2024.¹¹ Those are four hundred and five hundred times the baby-food figure. The register's strawberry entry carries a note of its own: EFSA identified some residue-trial information as unavailable, with a submission deadline of 30 January 2016.¹¹

Near-zero is also being grown. At Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, Kirsten Leiss leads work on a strawberry system built on natural predators, UV-C light and resilient growing rather than chemistry. "We've shown that it's possible: a healthy strawberry grown with almost no chemicals," she says on the university's account, which dates the starting point eight years back.¹² Since 2025 a Dutch supermarket chain has run a separate two-year pilot on commercial fields, with growers, an environmental group and an agricultural research firm.¹³

Fruit rots, and stopping it rotting is what the fungicide is for. The grower spraying it did not write the list of what may be sprayed. British households already bin 2.5 million tonnes of fresh fruit and vegetables a year.¹⁴

A rinse takes about a third of the fludioxonil off an apple

A residue sitting on a pear does not by itself make the pear unsafe. The open question is where this licensed route belongs in the policy for forever chemicals, which is the question MPs put and the reply passed over.

Until that changes, a household has three real options, and each of them costs something. The first is a rinse under the tap. In a trial gathered up by a 2026 review of household washing methods, a minute under running water took about 35% of the fludioxonil off apples and left the rest on them.¹⁵

The second is to take the skin off. The compound is fat-loving, and residues of that kind are more likely to sink into the wax on the skin, where rinsing struggles to reach them — one reason so much of it stays on.¹⁵ Peeling takes that layer away with the skin. It costs the skin, and it adds to the 2.5 million tonnes of fresh fruit and vegetables British households already bin each year.¹⁴

The third is for fruit with no skin worth taking off. A strawberry cannot be peeled, and washing shifts no more from a strawberry than from the average fruit in those trials.¹⁵ What remains is the route Cloy named to the MPs: biosolids cannot be used in organic production, and this class of pesticide will not be used on it.² Organic fruit costs more, and not every family can pay it.

None of the three is the repair. The residue results are published under an open licence, and anyone can download the year's file and read what was found on what.⁵ The file is written in chemical names, so a shopper cannot look up the category they were taught to act on. A "forever chemical: yes" column would not fix that, and on this substance it would tell a shopper something misleading. The fix is that the plan for forever chemicals and the plan for pesticides should be able to see each other.

This report was produced by YAN Consumer Intelligence using AI analytical systems that cross-reference regulatory frameworks, scientific evidence, and publicly observable product information to identify information gaps. Where organisations or products are referenced, they appear as representative examples of systemic patterns — not as subjects of allegation. Our analysis examines what standards and regulations require, not whether any individual organisation has acted wrongfully. Organisations referenced in this report are invited to provide additional context or corrections at [email protected]. See our Methodology for full details of our analytical process and corrections policy.