Stop Putting Stickers On Fruit
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When you buy a thing, I don’t care what it is, you expect it to work — to do its job, whatever that job happens to be. Grocery stores have taken to affixing stickers to produce: little stickers with a code number so the minimum-wage checkout guy can tell a Gala apple from a Jonagold. When you get said fruit home, you’ve got to peel that sticker off, often removing some of the fruit’s fragile peel in the process.
So you end up with an apple, a tomato, a plum, or a pear with a big ol’ pock-mark where beautiful peel is supposed to be. The labeling has ruined the product. If you’re particularly blessed, the overzealous sticker-affixer will have graced your produce with more than one sticker. If you happen to be making a gift basket, or recipe where the fruit’s presentation matters, you’re hosed. Sometimes the fruit and sticker meld into one, inseparable without a knife. I don’t care if the grocer or farmer sticks labels on pineapples, oranges, or other fruits with non-edible peels, but if I’m going to be eating it, I don’t want to consume sticker residue.
Grocers and farmers can certainly find other ways to tell people the information they need about their food: that it’s organic, genetically modified, grown in Ecuador, or causes cancer in lab rats. As for the stickers that are nothing but advertisements (for instance, with the URL of the fruit company) - I hope there’s a special place in hell for these people. Food should not be yet another forum for advertising.
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January 19th, 2006 at 10:30 am
Ever notice how the stickers don’t identify the type of fruit it is? apple? banana? lok at milk? bread?
January 21st, 2006 at 7:31 pm
Dude, they could fix the problem with edible stickers! Eat the advertising! They could come in different flavors! You could have, like, a brown sugar/cinnamon sticker on your apple. But what if they were “organic” stickers though. You know, made with cow poop or something. Eeww. Well, I avoid stuff grown in poop anyhow, so organic stickers would be a great idea. I would get a kick out of watching the organic hippies eating poopy stickers.
January 27th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
^^^ Hey, Hey^^ Good things do come from cow poop
January 30th, 2006 at 5:59 am
You’re an idiot.
January 30th, 2006 at 11:41 am
Oh, I dunno. Watching people eat the stickers, knowing what they’re made from, could be
kinda fun. Wouldn’t you laugh if you saw someone eating a sticker made out of poop
without knowing what it’s made of?
January 31st, 2006 at 10:16 pm
Believe it or not, those stickers aren’t put on by the store, they are affixed by someone
making slave wages in some third world agribusiness. Which always cracked me up, someone
somewhere has to determine the numbers for each type of fruit and veg. Someone, someplace
has a job that consists of doing nothing but keeping track of which numbers are used
and which one to put on a new variety!
There is a new way to do it, they’ve come up with a way to use a laser to etch the
number onto the flesh without going through more than some billionth of a fraction
of a centimeter.
February 1st, 2006 at 1:36 pm
When those stickers first appeared some years back, I wrote the FDA asking whether they had determined the the paper,and particularly inks (many extremely poisonous)used in the manufacture and printing of the stickers had been verified as being edible or even safe. No meaningful reply, ever. Think of the aromatic hydrocarbon glues leaching those inks and chemicals, not to mention the glue itself into the fruit,evidenced by the fact the peel and even some of the fruit adheres to the sticker when removed! Now most stickers are some type of plastic, and one must wonder how many have been inadvertently and unknowingly swallowed by consumers.
November 29th, 2006 at 11:51 am
I just did a google search trying to find out what happens when one eats these stickers, because I just did by accident.
December 6th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
I heard the stickers were put there in case someone got sick and they called a national recall on it, lots of good that would do us AFTER we have painstakingly removed it and ate it. Some of em peel off in tiny sections that drive me nuts too…