​Sunday, the Environmental Working Group released its annual Shoppers Guide to Pesticides in Produce, with the headline-grabbing "Dirty Dozen," or list of 12 fruits and vegetables most likely to be contaminated with pesticide residue. Newly crowned the dirtiest fruit in America: apples. Pesticides were found on 98 percent of the fruit; it was followed on the list by celery and strawberries (see the full list after the jump). To come up with the report, EWG analyzed nine years' worth of USDA data measuring residues in 53 common fruits and vegetables -- all washed or peeled.

SFoodie has kept a copy of the Dirty Dozen and its opposite, the Clean Fifteen, taped to our refrigerator for years. We love the EWG's annual shoppers' guide not just for what it tells us to avoid but what it tells us not to fear. Not every conventional fruit tree or vegetable bush is smothered in toxic chemicals, and if your primary reason for choosing between organic and conventional is reducing your family's pesticide intake, the Clean Fifteen lists conventionally grown vegetables -- onions, corn, mangoes, cabbage -- least likely to test positive for pesticide residue.

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We're blessed to live in a part of the world where we have access to fresh, ripe, unadulterated fruit, plucked at local farms and brought to our very fingertips at a bevy of farmers' markets across the city. In fact, the handful of farmers' markets not open all year here is small. Now spring is springing, and those few seasonal markets such as Castro, Upper Haight, and Mission Bay are beginning to open up like the first crocuses of the season.

The last few years have seen a major proliferation of neighborhood markets, and even local hospitals have taken small markets under their wings. Consequently, the distribution is so broad it's no inconvenience to hit one up, even on a work day.

That said, note that the lion's share of markets is on weekends and midweek (pro tip: make that doctor's appointment for a Wednesday), so make sure you don't have an urgent need for stinging nettles on a Monday or Friday, lest you find yourself out of luck.

We've charted the San Francisco farmers' markets (above) for easy reference about days and locations, using a festive, Easter-esque pastel palette: pink pins for Saturday markets; purple for Sunday; yellow for Tuesday; turquoise for Wednesday; and green for Thursday.

Saturday
• Ferry Plaza: 8 a.m.-2 p.m., year round
• Noe Valley: 24th Street between Sanchez and Vicksburg, 8 a.m.-1 p.m., year round
• Fillmore: O'Farrell at Fillmore, 9 a.m.-1 p.m., year round
• Alemany: 100 Alemany, dawn to dusk, year round

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If you've ever been out and about and wondered where's the best place grab a good gin and tonic or get your bike fixed ― as chosen by seasoned pros like ourselves ― you're in luck. We've just launched a completely free iPhone app that takes all the goodness of our Best Of... issues and crams it into your pants (or purse).

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Sonya Yu via newtastemarket/Flickr

The men of Mission Gastroclub.

​New Taste Marketplace

Where: St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, 500 De Haro (at Mariposa)

When: Sat., Mar. 12, noon-5 p.m.

Cost: Donations welcomed for the Food Pantry; prices vary for food items

The rundown: It's only been a month since the last New Taste Marketplace and we're jonesing for more. This Saturday brings the fifth month of this charming Potrero food market and it's already starting to feel like a hallowed institution. Last month SFoodie popped a few buttons on salmon and jalapeno deviled eggs, slow-cooked ribs, meatball sandwiches, lemon ice cream, black sesame peanut brittle, and much more. This weekend's event, which includes new Marketplace vendors like Bike Basket Pies and Old Skool Café, should prove to be equally irresistible. Hopefully this shindig won't get too big; last month it maintained a funky neighborhood feel, with chatty vendors, decent prices, reasonable crowds, and live local music.

New York refugee Jesse Hirsch tweets at @Jesse_Hirsch. Follow SFoodie at @sfoodie, and like us on Facebook.

southlakeunion.komonews.com

Any toothpick samples, brah?

​SFoodie has always found shopping the farmers' market a powerful kind of therapy, hooking our hemp shopping bag over one shoulder, digging the gorgeous colors, and wallowing in the sensual luxury of sniffing herbs and flowers.

For shoppers at Seattle's newly launched Cannabis Farmers' Market, that kind of retail therapy reached new heights yesterday.

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kara e./Yelp

When the Upper Haight store opened last week, nine local food vendors debuted retail products with it.

​San Francisco's newest Whole Foods store might be the least scruffy thing at the western terminus of Haight Street, but that's not the most remarkable thing about it. What sets the store apart from every other in Northern California ― and across the Whole Foods empire, for that matter ― is its offering of foods from small, San Francisco-based companies, some of them mobile vendors recruited as part of the NorCal region's Street Eats initiative.

Ariel Zambelich/The Wall Street Journal

Harv Singh.

​The guy responsible for rounding them up: Harvindar Singh, local product forager for Whole Foods' 35-store Northern California region. For the Haight Street store alone, Singh launched nine San Francisco-based businesses, including Azalina's, Hapa SF, Wholesome Bakery, Love and Hummus, Numa Snacks, and Paulie's Pickling. And though it might not seem that way, there wasn't any plan to make the store at Haight and Stanyan a local food showplace. It's that S.F. vendors have achieved something like critical mass.

"There are a lot of food entrepreneurs coming out of San Francisco, from La Cocina to some of the street-food people," Singh tells SFoodie. In fact, the Street Eats program is unique to this region. No other cluster of Whole Foods stores is doing anything like it.

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Tamara Palmer/2009

Wholesome Bakery's baby sweet potato and banana pies.

​Whole Foods is getting more wholesome. Wholesome Bakery, that is.

Mandy Harper, owner and head baker at Wholesome Bakery, is expanding beyond her La Victoria hub through a new partnership with Whole Foods.

Harper's line of vegan cookies and cupcakes (including the ever-so-popular mint chocolate chip cookie sandwich) can now be found at the week-old Whole Foods Haight Street location, joining the ranks of other current or former mobile vendors and communal kitchen comrade Hapa SF who are also preparing ready-to-eat meals for Whole Foods' Northern California region's Street Eats initiative.

Kimberly Sandie

Mandy Harper.

​This week, Wholesome's treats are rolling out to Whole Foods Potrero and eventually the rest of the San Francisco locations. Within the next six months, Harper says, they'll be available in 30 Bay Area locations. "We'll see if that's possible, but I'm definitely going to shoot for as many as I can," she says. "I'm starting with all the S.F. stores and will keep going from there."

You can also find Wholesome Bakery at local businesses including Valencia Whole Foods, Real Food Company, Beautifull, Sidewalk Juice, and Café Divis. Harper does a daily catering gig at Zynga. And starting in March, Wholesome will be the exclusive dessert option for Source, a New Age vegan/vegetarian restaurant launching in SOMA. Harper's future plans still include her own storefront in the Mission or Marina, but that's unlikely to happen for another year, especially now that Harper's busy baking for Whole Foods and other retailers.

What else is on the horizon? Harper's rolling out new additions to her lineup, including vegan brownies, cinnamon rolls, marshmallows, and get this ― butter-free croissants, which sound just about perfect for francophile vegans with a thing for Whole Foods.

Jonathan Kauffman

Hapa SF's vegan pinakbet, which premiered with two other entrees at the Haight Street Whole Foods.

​Yesterday's stealth early opening of the Stanyan Street Whole Foods brought more than EARTH University bananas to Upper Haight. It also brought a trio of packaged Filipino entrees from truck vendor Hapa SF. Hapa's William Pilz tells SFoodie by e-mail that the three prepack products are meatless, since otherwise they'd have to be prepped in a USDA-certified kitchen, which Pilz calls prohibitively pricey. "As with all of our food they [are] rooted with Filipino ideas but modernized to embrace seasonal produce and sustainability," Pilz writes. On offer: vegan pinakbet ($6.99), which eighty-sixes the bitter melon and shrimp paste, and comes with rice; arroz caldo ($7.99), now with artichokes and blood oranges, packed with toppings for garnishing; and torta pinakbet ($6.99), "our version of what others might think of as quiche," Pilz says, eggs, spinach, and pinakbet wrapped in puff pastry.

SFoodie picked up the pinakbet, a vaguely ratatouille-like stew of julienne zucchini, eggplant, and piquillo peppers over jasmine rice. It was good, with vegetables that'd softened but still crunched against the teeth, well seasoned, and with a decent ratio of stew to rice. We didn't even miss the bagoong. Pilz says he's hoping to supply the city's other Whole Foods with entrees sometime soon.

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clarksworth/Flickr

Smoke up in the car first, and this can feel like a fucking blast.

​Like complaining about people on welfare while collecting unemployment yourself, eating 99-cent double-bacon cheeseburgers while voting down health care, shopping at Costco is one of our God-Given Rights in the country where it's easier to buy bullets than wine. The entire world views us as materialistic jerks, so why not own it?

But while a trip to Costco should leave you feeling invigorated, punching the air and screaming "America! What a country!", even for the Realest of Real Americans, the experience can be overwhelming: carts as big as Volvos, human beings clawing each other for the last sample of Entenmann's, and lines that stretch all the way to the next closest Costco. However, there is one way to get your 70-pound tub of Grey Poupon and eat it, too: SHOP HIGH. Follow these tips for making your next trip to Costco the most delightful ever.

First things first, you must acquire a membership card. DO NOT BE INTIMIDATED. This isn't Skull and Bones; anyone can get in. You just need about $50 and a winning attitude. You should be so fucked up that you have both.

Once that's accomplished, grab a shopping cart. And by grab a shopping cart, we mean start pumping iron now so you're able to push that behemoth. Seriously, the thing could serve as a spacious summer home for the Klumps.

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Mary-Anne C./Yelp

​It's not the highly popular 20 percent coupon of years past, but this month you can nab 15 percent off weekdays at Rainbow Grocery. It works like this: You spend $5 or more at a fellow co-op in the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NoBAWC, pronounced like "no boss" ― get it?), and your original-copy receipt gets you 15 percent off at Rainbow. Arizmendi, Mandela Foods, Nabolom Bakery, the Juice Bar Collective, and Other Avenues are the food-related places in the network, unlike the Lusty Lady, which is also part of NoBAWC.

Too bad, since it's easy to spend $5 or more there. So they say.