Oh! No! Joe's whining -- again

Some time ago -- maybe even a few years, since the past is getting dimmer and dimmer as I add candles on my birthday cake -- I complained in this very column about the stickers on fruit sold in supermarkets.

Dear reader, you are about to learn more than you ever wanted to know about those stickers. And about my peevish whining.

I don't like the fruit stickers. Let me be very plain about that.

There are, of course, certain fruits whose peels aren't meant to be consumed. Bananas, for example. Or kiwis. Or oranges. I don't mind stickers on bananas or kiwis or oranges. That's because there is no expectation, nutritionally or otherwise, that I will ever eat a banana or orange peel or the skin of a kiwi -- which, by the way, has the same texture as a sow's underbelly. Try it and see.

As for most other commonly eaten fruit, it is not only possible, but quite likely that you might choose to put a succulent bite, peel and all, into your mouth. Our mothers told us that's where all the vitamins were. Our mothers never lied. It wasn't until we became parents ourselves that we discovered our mothers couldn't face peeling anything that could just as easily be eaten. That was a long time ago. Mothers peeled stuff in those days rather than opening boxes of frozen veggies or bags of pre-washed and peeled produce.

But I digress, as usual.

We live in a highly technological age, and even vegetables and fruits have been touched by wizardry.

If you do an Internet search of "Stickers on fruit," you will get approximately 282,000 links to Web sites about that topic. Imagine that.

There are Web sites for collectors of fruit stickers. Who knew?

There are Web sites for fruit lovers like me who hate fruit stickers.

There's even a Web site for a 1980s British duo's recording of an apparently terrible song about stickers on fruit. The duo called itself "Stickers on Fruit." As bad as they are, I'd like to meet those two.

The purpose of the fruit stickers -- Caution: You're about to get a lecture -- is to tell checkout clerks, who may not even eat fruit, what they are selling and what to charge for it. The numbers on the teensy, tiny stickers are what the supermarket industry calls the Price Lookup Code.

Without PLCs, you might well pay tomato prices for a Fuji apple. No fooling.

Recently, my wife put a red pepper on the weekly grocery list. When I got to the checkout, the clerk said, "Is this a pear or something?"

No, I said, it's a red pepper or something.

"No fooling," she responded, as she punched the PLC into her computerized checkout system.

As it turns out, the PLC also provides consumer information. If the number code is four digits, the item is conventionally grown. If it is five digits and starts with a 9, it's organically grown. And if it's five digits and starts with an 8, it's genetically engineered.

But whether the fruit is natural, organic or Frankenstein, it's still next to impossible to get the dang sticker off before you eat it.

So, here's what I suggest: Digestible stickers. Smarter checkout clerks. Fewer cranky fruit lovers. Any or all of the above.

By the way, another thing I don't like is automated stoplights that never respond to long lines of vehicles. Cape Girardeau has several of them. I'd like to lob a few choice fruits -- with stickers, of course -- at these stoplights.

But I won't. And I'll still fuss over the stickers on my Winesaps.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.