Outburst #12
Fruit Stickers—The Overlooked Booty of the Lunchroom
Andrea Shiman
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I am looking for the roots of my urge to collect fruit stickers. Since graduate school, I have been in the habit of peeling off the small label before I eat a piece of fruit, then pressing it onto whatever surface is within reach. I have established permanent colonies of stickers on my computer monitor at work, on my personal journals and in my office notebooks, and on the cabinet above my kitchen counter.
In an attempt to describe my habit, I circled around topics of collecting, personal record-keeping, defacement of company property, and how no aspect of modern food production remains free of the touch of the marketing director. Such analysis should not overshadow the stickers' inherent worth, however. Produce labels are the overlooked booty of the lunchroom.
The allure of like objects (that is, a set of things with similar size, shape, and whatnot) is difficult to resist. I am uneasy about the collector mentality, with its inevitable trajectory of ever-increasing sums spent on objects whose values are appreciated by a diminishingly small number of people. I can't stomach the idea of consumption as a creative pursuit. A more informal sort of acquisition - saving the disposable artifacts of everyday life - lets me satisfy the urge to collect.
The rules for my fruit sticker collection are 1) each sticker must be unique (no repeats), and 2) the item of produce must be eaten by me.
During graduate school, I started placing the stickers I removed from apples, oranges, plums, and bananas onto the cover of a small spiral notebook I toted around with me. Stickers completely cover the surface of several of my notebooks from these years. At the moment I have two venues for sticker collecting: my notebook at work, and the door of the kitchen cabinet above the counter where I cook. My home series is more vegetable-oriented than my work notebook, since I eat lunch at my desk, and cook dinner at home. The finest collection I ever had, though, encircled my computer monitor at my last job site. The plastic shore surrounding the screen was filled with fruit stickers, without any repeats. It was a monument to the grumpiness engendered by a year and half's worth of lunches grudgingly eaten at my desk.
Produce labels range from 2-color, just-the-facts, produce-code-only, to tiny jewels of advertising with multi-color gradients, company URLs, variety names, and snappy slogans. The essence of the produce sticker is the PLU code, the 4 or 5 digit number which universally identifies produce type and variety. Further information falls into the realm of marketing. Organic produce codes begin with a "9," and genetically engineered produce must be prefixed with "8." The Produce Marketing Association recommends that each numeral in the code itself should be formatted in 14 point type (minimum), where the width is no less than 1/3 the height, and printed on a high contrast background. I was excited to find out that this organization publishes "A Guide to Coding Fresh Produce," a 3-ring binder which is a list of all generic produce codes, but spending $105 plus Shipping & Handling seemed anathema to the principles of the collection.
There is some tendency for fruit considered exotic in mainstream America, like mangoes and papayas, to have more elaborate and colorful, and often larger, labels. Never mind that a lot of the more prosaic produce, apples, etc., travels across the equator. Likewise for the more rarified varieties (gourmet, organic, heirloom, etc.), which pretty much always have more graphically sophisticated labels than, say, a Red Delicious purchased at the company cafeteria. I have noticed an increase in wordiness the last few years, particularly with more and more stickers including producer URLs. The first example I saw is long gone - it was on some unpretentious variety of apple, or maybe a banana - and it struck me as a promotional gimmick. Finding web site addresses on produce stickers is rather common now. Even oranges have URLs.
My favorite labels are the ones with names. Susie limes, Mr. Victor Vegetables, Healthy Day Papaya, Yummy Braeburn apples from NZ, Ripe-N-Ready Plums, Responsible Choice Golden Delicious. For some time I had the impression that one of my stickers (baroque oblong, orange border and bright blue background, featuring a smiling, babyfaced orange dinosaur), labeled Sweet Pluot, fell into the charmingingly-named category, probably because I consistently misread Pluot as Pluto. As it happens, a pluot is an honest-to-goodness kind of fruit, a plum crossed with an apricot, resulting in a hybrid that exceeds the sweetness of its constituents. There are at least 19 types of pluots; I'm keeping my fingers crossed that one day I'll come across one of these unusual varieties, along with a sticker imprinted with its fanciful name: Dapple Dandy (large; red spots on pale green to yellow skin; juicy sweet flesh in red or pink) or Last Chance (large, green skin, sweet green flesh) or Hand Grenade (large, oblong; juicy sweet flesh).
Despite an array of color, message, and graphic composition, the shape of the produce label inself is not so varied. I do not recall having seen a round fruit or vegetable which did not have a round or ovoid label. Of the lunchroom fruits, bananas are the only ones with playfully-shaped labels (like the B-shaped sticker on the banana I ate yesterday afternoon). There is something Classically right in reflecting the roundness of the fruit with a round label. Likewise, the banana's whimsical shape is acknowledged, appropriately, in a bolder and more irregularly outlined sticker. Another noteworthy feature is the "peel me" tab - a protuding bump on the perimeter of the sticker, often marked with an outward-pointing triangle, making it easier to remove. I have not found a predictive factor indicating which labels have the tab and which do not.
I imagine that grocers began using the identifying stickers to help checkout clerks avoid entanglements with customers who insisted that a $1.99/lb Braeburn was really a $.80/lb Cortland. Unfortunately I am not in possession of any of these early examples. The form that this labeling eventually took* - each nectarine, bell pepper, honeydew melon with its own small sticker - brings up some interesting questions, such as whether its use required the development of special adhesives which would cling to a fruit's waxed skin without leaving residue behind. Do the creators of these labels know that they have a life beyond their purpose, and don't just end up stuck on the floor? That their miniature canvases are not overlooked?
About the Author: Andrea Shiman is a software engineer living in New York City.