Re: Vegetable Rinse

This seems logical. Iodine has been known in the past as a substance used for taking water not safe to drink and turning it into water safe to drink. The thing that sort of jumps out at me about this kind of old advice / lore is, how does it work and what are the limitations? The general idea I've seen put out there is that Iodine can be used for turning sea/salt water into something suitable for drinking. But, a question that this old advice generally seems to skip over is - how much Iodine does it take to convert X amount of funky water into drinkable water? It would also be nice to understand the specifics of how, exactlly, does Iodine go about rendering funky water into safe drinking water? In the mean time, it seems logical that if Iodine can make dirty water safe for drinking, it can also be used as a safe solvent for cleaning vegetables and or fruits.

There is a different produce cleaner I've been using: distilled water mixed into H202 and Vinegar. I got from a tip that came by way of Gary Null which he describes as a simple, safe solvent for cleaning _____ (whaterver) off produce. _______can be anything, from residual finger prints left behind due to all the intermediate handling, as well as residues from pesticides and other polllution. Of recent years, it seems the "handling" aspect has really gotten excessive. Think about it. How much additional handlilng do you think is required in order to put an inventory cotnrol sticky label on every bleeping apple, orange, lime, bell pepper and the like? does this get done by human or computer?

The basic Null recipe uses food-grade Peroxide, Red Wine Vinegar and distilled water. Don't tell anyone but I have substituted home-made ACV in place of RWV ;) Don't quote me but the quantities, but I seem to recall the basic recipe uses a gallon of pure / distilled water, to which is added 1/4 cup of vinegar with a teaspoon or so of food-grade H202. Place produce to be rinsed into this mixture, swirl about for several seconds. Then remove the produce and place into a separate container of clean / pure water, swirl around a bit to rinse, then remove the produce and place on a clean surface until consumed.

For large families such that, come market day, a lot of produce is brought into the house at one time, I can imagine that over time, this would require a decent amount of disitlled water, vinegar and peroxide to be kept on hand. I remember what it was like in our house growing up. On payday every two weeks, mom went to the grocery. Among the stuff she brought back would be somewhere around a 1/4 bushell of produce all told. In my present single-person house, it takes 5 hours running electricity to produce 1.5 gallons of distilled water. This sort of brings me back to an earlier question. Lets say that instead of distilled water, you draw muni water out of your tap and fill the kitchen sink. Can a few drops of Lugol's be used to make up for the fact that the water is not distilled? Furthermore, given Lugol's potent nature, would using it ALSO render obsolete the need to even use the vinegar and peroxide mix? Over the long term, a few drops of Lugols added to the kind of dirty stuff that regularly comes out of muni taps would seem a simpler solution than always needing to have 1 gallon distilled water plus 1/4 cup vinegar plus 1 teaspoon H202 on hand....for now, anyway.