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Coin and stamp collections are tired, didn’t you know? What’s wired in the world of collecting? I’ll let you know by taking a look at a few categories over the next month or so. Let’s begin with fruit stickers…
Now, I don’t mind peeling the dang things off, say, a banana, where they’re pretty harmless, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally ingested a sticker while eating an apple or a pear because I thought I got it off already, only to discover a second one waiting on the underside–an unwanted bastard sticker-sibling.
While they may annoy me, and probably you, too, I’m guessing, for others, like Roger Harris, fruit stickers are collectables. On his Web site, for instance, you can click through scans of more than 1,000 different stickers. And if you think that’s a lot, Xavier Heyte, in Belgium, claims on his Web site that he has over 11,000 in his collection. There’s also Mark Wickens who doesn’t collect stickers, but boasts over 12,000 fruit wrappers going all the way back to the 1800s (to say nothing of his impressive olive oil label collection!).
Why not, right? Kids love collecting Pokemon stickers, so why shouldn’t adults spend their time collecting fruit and vegetable stickers? Also, like baseball cards, many sticker enthusiasts like to trade to complete their collections. Have an extra 2000-series Spanish Honeydew? I’ll trade you my extra Brazillian Papaya from 1998, which I bet you can’t find anywhere in your country.
On one of the Web sites I visited for this post, a collector even specified his area of interest: “General fruits and vegetables collector but with special emphasis on mangoes, melons of all kinds, apples and bananas.”
But enough poking fun. Here’s some cool trivia I picked up along the way:
The codes on the stickers are called PLU codes, or price look up codes.
The PLU numbers also tell you how the fruit was grown
Conventionally grown fruit has 4 digits
Organically grown fruit has 5 and starts with the number 9
Genetically engineered has 5 numbers and starts with the number 8
As for them being annoying, there does seem to be hope for sticker-ingesters like me: static electricity is being used more and more in place of the old food-grade adhesives, making them much simpler to peel off.
Comments (11)
Comment
Argh. I HATE fruit stickers - they always creep me out. . . I think it stems from the fact that when I forget about the sticker, I end up eating it and finding it a day later in my . . . well, anyway . . . Thanks David, for giving a good argument FOR the annoying little things!
posted by Firebrand on 11-8-2007 at 10:28 am
It always amazes me how many people there are in the world who have right much free time on their hands…
posted by Jen on 11-8-2007 at 10:34 am
Actually, it might be a good time to invest in a collection of these. There were rumblings a couple of years back about laser-tattooing the information directly onto the fruit/veggie. To quote straight from the NYT:
…”But it was designed with the consumer in mind: laser coding could mean the end of those tiny stubborn stickers that have to be picked, scraped or yanked off produce.”
The whole article is still online at:
www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/dining/19fruit.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5088&en=3a2eb3f2f127653a&ex=1279425600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
posted by Roger on 11-8-2007 at 10:46 am
Quick followup to my above comment - if anyone out there can posit a theory as to why that particular tidbit was not only still in my brain two years after the fact, but also apparently very nicely indexed so as to make it leap to the front upon reading this post, please advise.
posted by Roger on 11-8-2007 at 10:50 am
I’ve always thought that fruit stickers were too good to throw away and not good enough to save. In one house we lived in, our son and I filled a whole kitchen cabinet door with banana stickers over the course of five years or so. I also put the static cling stickers off of sunglasses on my glove compartment door in the car.
posted by Leslie Booher on 11-8-2007 at 1:20 pm
Recently I took a sticker off a pear and stuck it on the side of the sink while I washed the pear, planning to remove it and throw it away later. I forgot about it, and discovered that night (guess how) that the cat ate the sticker. On purpose!
posted by kdub on 11-8-2007 at 1:23 pm
My toddler asks for stickers at the cash register at the grocery store. He frequently gets produce stickers, and has a nice collection of them on his jacket and car seat. Perhaps this is how it starts.
posted by jenbe on 11-8-2007 at 2:06 pm
Hey! No mocking the afflicted. I’ve been collecting fruit stickers for a couple of years now, and I can’t say my collection is quite up to the standards of those mentioned in the article, it’s still quite a respectable piece of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. ;) I mainly concentrate on apple and banana stickers, with some other fruits thrown in for good measure. Banana stickers are probably my favourite, since they’re usually quite large and colourful - it makes them very satisfying to collect!
posted by -@^@- on 11-8-2007 at 2:58 pm
I have a small fruit sticker collection at work. (100-125 stickers in my cubicle) Some of my co-workers add stickers to my collection. It doesn’t serve any real purpose other than something to do, but I like to look the different types of stickers. I didn’t know that people actually took fruit sticker collection so seriously.
posted by lmborgmeyer on 11-8-2007 at 4:20 pm
I had a guy that worked for me for years that used to eat a lot of fruit and put the stickers on his computer monitor. When he retired, the monitor had so many stickers on it, we just threw it out. It wasn’t worth the work it would have taken to clean it up to give to someone else.
posted by tpal on 11-8-2007 at 7:22 pm
This post made me think of a tradition the choirs at my high school had. The day after the first choir concert of the year was National Banana Sticker Day. So, any and all choir members would go to Stop-and-Shop (a local grocery store), find all the banana stickers they could, put them all on one banana, and then buy it. Then everybody wore one the next day.
This tradition started the first year the school opened in 1994, and apparently it’s still going strong, since my youngest brother participated in it last month. But heaven help you if you don’t go to Stop-and-Shop. My a different younger brother’s group went to Wal-Mart, and they have gone down in history as the tradition breakers.
posted by Janel on 11-10-2007 at 12:57 am