Whether you buy your veggies from a farmer's market or at the grocery store, you need to give them a good wash when you get home. But how clean is clean enough? Help is at hand from an unexpected source in the shape of the PureGo PD100 from Asus.
Even if freshly bought fruit and veg looks good enough to eat, there may be residual traces of pesticides, pollutants or other harmful substances that could be a pain in the gut, or worse.
According to the FDA, it's estimated that almost 48 million people in the US suffer as a result of contaminated food every year. So we rinse produce under running water, give our veg a bath or perhaps even invest in specialist cleaning products.
With the PureGo PD100, Asus – which is perhaps best known for its computers, laptops and phones – says that it's bringing "laboratory-grade food safety technology into households kitchens."
After popping your newly-bought veggies into a tub of water for a few minutes, the PD100 is added to the bath so that its 28-fin spiral filter is submerged. As you splish and splosh, an optical sensor behind the grille works with "dynamic algorithms" to look out for harmful residues leeching into the water from the veg.
A status ring light up top indicates whether the produce is ready to eat (green) or whether more washing and rinsing is required (orange or red). However, Asus does note that the device can only detect around 70 percent of the pesticides in use as of 2020 in the US, and that certain produce may interfere with detection accuracy. But if the alternative is just guessing, then the PD100 could prove a useful addition to the food prep arsenal.
The 102 x 98 x 47-mm (4 x 3.85 x 1.85-in) device has Bluetooth 5.0 cooked in, and can pair with a companion app running on an iOS/Android handset to log detection stats for subsequent analysis. And the internal 1,200-mAh battery is reckoned good for six hours of per-charge use before it needs to rest on the supplied wireless charging cradle.
The PureGo PD100 is on sale in North America now for US$199.99.
Product page: PureGo PD100