Forty-six percent of US adults rank pesticides and pesticide residues among their top-3 food safety concerns, according to the IFIC 2025 Food and Health Survey of 3,000 US adults fielded in March 2025 — the third-highest food worry in the ranking, behind foodborne illness and cancer-causing chemicals. That figure is the inaction-side proxy shown above, used because no US survey asks the question consumers actually face: “do you regret not buying organic?” The 46% is ambient concern, not retrospective regret, and it includes many people who already buy organic and therefore cannot logically regret the conventional choice — so the true share of conventional-buyer regret is bounded above by 46% and is likely substantially lower. What the IFIC data establishes is a wide population of US adults who carry some level of unease about pesticide residues, regardless of whether they have ever translated that unease into a buying decision.
On the action side, 15% of US adults actively avoid organic foods, per Gallup’s 2014 national survey of 1,013 US adults — the share who have effectively concluded the organic premium is not worth it as a regular buying choice. This figure also falls short of a direct regret measure: some of that 15% never paid an organic premium at all and avoid on cost or principle, while others tried organic and walked back from it. The two figures come from different surveys a decade apart, use different sampling and weighting methodologies, and measure different constructs (behavioral stance vs concern ranking), so the apparent 3:1 inaction-to- action ratio overstates the precision of the cross-side comparison. Pew Research (2016) found that 55% of US adults believe organic produce is healthier than conventional, corroborating the direction of the inaction signal while suffering from the same current-organic-buyer contamination.
The literal regret survey for this decision does not exist, and the proxies bracket a directional answer rather than measure it. What the data supports is that more US adults carry organic-related concern than carry organic-avoidance commitment, which is the structural shape of an inaction-dominates pattern in the Gilovich sense. The underlying probability question — whether pesticide residues on conventional US produce actually cause measurable harm at consumer exposure levels — is covered in the pesticide-residue-food entry, which estimates the attributable lifetime risk at roughly 1 in 1,000,000. The regret data and the harm data do not converge: the concern is widespread, the avoidance is narrower, and the measured residue risk on US-compliant produce is vanishingly small. The decision-pair page reports the proxy figures; readers can carry their own weights for what counts as regret.