Bananas! Woody Allen's finest moment? Hardly. My current mental condition? Possibly. Nature's most efficiently packaged foodstuff? Exactly. For thousands of years, these musaceous comestibles have delighted humans with their easily removable and completely biodegradable packagings. The only enhancement that food technologists ever felt the need to add were those tiny sticky labels that carry the PLU (price look-up) data -- slightly irritating at worst, innocuous at best, one would have thought ... ? But no. Some people devote large portions of their lives to wrestling off fruit labels, often emerging to find one or two said labels stuck in their hair! The horror. So now the labels are to be replaced by tattoos. This might be okay for bananas, but what about for their less thoughtfully packaged cousins -- peaches and pears, for instance, whose skins people routinely elect to devour? How long before the tattoo ink is discovered to be more toxic than originally thought? Oh, okay, so the tattooing procedure doesn’t necessarily involve ink, rather a dexterously applied laser. Nevertheless, to whom can I complain, in a vaguely unhinged and irrational manner, about these unnatural tattoos? More importantly <splutter>, why does the International Federation for Produce Coding choose to use its own notation for classification of fruits (such as 3127 for a lovely large pomegranate) rather than the perfectly good DDC notation derived from 634 Orchards, fruits, forestry? <Deep breath> Hmm, need to find a quiet bench somewhere. Meanwhile, you’ll find all sorts of good stuff about the management of food retailing in grocery stores at 381.4564130068.
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