The latest survey of 11- to 16-year-olds’ eating habits, commissioned by the Cancer Research Campaign, finds them shunning fruit and veg for junk food. So the Government scheme, under which all children aged four to six will get a free piece of fruit each school day, sounds useful. In the pilots, pupils are munching away on apples, pears, bananas and satsumas.

This would be good news, if the Government’s own figures did not show that these all contain residues of toxic pesticides. Last year, 72 per cent of the apples and 71 per cent of the pears we ate contained multiple residues, some of them illegal.

The Government hasn’t tested bananas since 1997, but even then, 90 per cent of them were contaminated. The toxic profile of satsumas is unknown since these have not been tested. When mandarins and clementines were checked four years ago, however, there were residues in all samples.

Ironically, the National School Fruit Scheme is part of the Government’s strategy to prevent heart disease and cancer. But pesticides are poisons. Some are known to disrupt hormones, others such as organophosphates (originally invented by the Nazis as nerve gas), wreak havoc on the central nervous system. Many are carcinogens or demonstrated to cause birth defects in laboratory rats.

Should regulators and educators blindly encourage children to eat fruit? It’s one thing to point out that fruits contain vitamins and phytochemicals that are protective against disease. But when they come laced with poisons whose cumulative “cocktail effect” is unknown, should we tell children “fruit is good for you”?

Due to the immaturity of their organs and body systems, children are more vulnerable to toxins. If you consider the levels of chemical residues in fresh fruit and vegetables (more than 40 per cent are contaminated), you can mount a case that children would be better off eating processed food.

This is heresy to health educators, who insist that the advantages of increased fruit and vegetable consumption outweigh the pesticide risk. They want to stamp out talk of pesticides lest it becomes more difficult to get fresh tomatoes and sprouts down the nation’s neck.

Might a health warning on fruit and vegetables be a compromise between promoting higher consumption while giving people a more balanced appraisal of their benefits? Back in 1995, when UK carrots had levels of organophosphates 25 times higher than expected, the Government decided to advise that carrots should be peeled and topped.

Since then, the advice of the Chief Medical Officer has been that “peeling fruit is a matter of consumer choice but it is a sensible additional precaution when preparing fruit for small children”. Weasel words, since the bulk of “systemic” residues lies in the tissue of the fruit or vegetable.

Now the Food Standards Agency is leaning on the Advisory Committee on Pesticides to revoke this embarrassing advice because it “implies that only organic fruit should be supplied under the National School Fruit Scheme” and this would “undermine the credibility of the current regulatory system for pesticides”.

What’s more, the FSA is pressing the ACP to agree a statement that “levels of pesticide residues in fruits and vegetables available in the UK are highly unlikely to pose a risk”.

This statement would be music to the agrochem lobby, which is unacceptable when pesticide residue levels in food are creeping up. Friends of the Earth says that the FSA should “use its position to ensure that fruit is free of toxic residues so that it can be recommended wholeheartedly to children”.

If the Government wants children to eat fruit, it should be healthy fruit. It could work towards this by giving much more support to organic farming and introducing a pesticide tax.

In the meantime, it should tell the truth about our food.

Joanna Blythman is the author of “The Food Our Children Eat” (Fourth Estate pound;7.99) and “The Food We Eat”(Penguin pound;6.99).