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Fruit Tags
Sun Pacific #4012, Gee Whiz #4129s, Washington Sm. #4129. These are some of the familiar notations that you may have recently come across on your fruit. Unfortunately, my mouth has come across these annoying little stickers well before my eyes on too many occasions. When and why did this whole thing start? Why is it that every time I have a yearning for a nectarine or the desire for a Granny Smith, I have to do battle with a little sticker as unwanted as a dent or bruise?
This was initiated a few years ago I suppose. Before then the only time you saw a sticker on any piece of fruit was the biggest baddest banana of the bunch. The marquis banana whose little blue Chiquita sticker could cause little brothers and sisters to do battle over. Not that the kids wanted the biggest banana, nope, just the sticker to put on their clothes or notebook. Other than that there was a seemingly purplish stamp on many of the oranges I consumed which all said "Starkist." That was all. No bother, except for the kids fighting over the banana, but certainly no danger of consumption. But now we are inundated with stickers galore, at LEAST one sticker per fruit. I've noted up to three on one wayward tangelo. And I must say they have become the bane of my existence.
On citrus fruit, I don't mind so much, as in most cases the peel is discarded before any eating begins. But let me tell you, on the rare occasion when I am making lemon zest, nothing can infuriate me more than clogging up my grater with a little white #4335! But why the hell do they have to stick those damned things on my stone fruits, apples, pears or any other fruit of which I enjoy eating the skin? Is it so hard for the supermarket cashier to tell the difference between a Red Delicious and a Macintosh? An Anjou and a Bartlett? A grape and a grapefruit? For goodness sake, haven't all the supermarkets installed these high tech computers that scan, weigh and calculate your food purchases these days? You'd figure that they could program these things to tell the difference between a tomato and a potato. Albeit I will admit that the person operating these scanners intelligence is such that they should put a yellow little #8775 on his protruding forehead.
The thing that annoys me the most, after actually eating one of the stickers, which coincidentally recreates the same sensation as chewing on aluminum foil, is that it ruins the damned piece of fruit! On few occasions the stickers are manufactured with a tiny little lift tab that makes the removal process somewhat unobtrusive. However, most stickers are put on with Krazy Glue, have no edge to get a finger under, and makes the removal process tantamount to pulling a Band-Aid off of your hairy leg! Something's got to go. In the case of my leg its is about 225 roots of hair and considerable pain. On my peach it's about one square centimeter of peach fuzz and skin, surgically removed, thus opening the rest of the beautiful fruit to bacteria, and other nastiness that causes the fruit to brown within 16 minutes. A staph infection of the flesh if you will.
I'm pretty diligent about washing my fruit before letting anyone in my family eat it. Probably because of all the E-Coli stories I've shot over the years. One three year old girl became deathly ill from eating triple washed mesclun mix. No one told the girl's family however that the mesclun mix was triple washed in cattle feces, thus nearly causing her death. Perhaps if the manufactures would have put a tiny little warning sticker on each piece of lettuce the whole thing could have been avoided. However, had you eaten the salad without removing the stickers, you would have had ingested enough paper to have pooped a roll of fax paper. But back to the fruit. NEVER EVER wash your fruit before removing the sticker. Somehow the glue they use, mixed with water or the vegetable wash that I regularly use, causes a bond so strong that you could hang a 28 pound watermelon off of an I-beam while a man holds on to the melon underneath. You could display this event 50 floors above Times Square without every worrying about the melon detaching from the I-beam. But unless the man holding onto the watermelon had a #3552 sticker on one of his palms, he'd look like much like a tomato I once did battle with trying to remove a #4214...pureed.
How long will it be before this sticker things gets totally out of control? Imagine picking at each concord grape or dried apricot? I'm just thankful that the boneheads at the A&P don't consider basmati rice a fruit or vegetable. I know it's a bit of a fuss but I'm seriously considering saving these used stickers on waxed paper and then the next time that I go to the Food Emporium, randomly re-sticking the old stickers onto the fruit for sale. I just can't help but want to see the store clerk going through conniptions when his black plums get rung up as rutabagas and his seven dollar a piece pineapples get rung up as one Golden Delicious apple!