I Say Tomato, You Say 4664

Do we really need to have a label on every single tomato, every single avocado, every single peach, apple and orange?

I went grocery shopping this morning and bought a bag of four avocados. Not only does the bag have a barcode, but every avocado within the bag also bears a coded label. I bought a branch of tomatoes on the vine. Each tomato has its own label, each label impossible to remove without digging one’s fingernail into the delicate flesh. I would like to dig my fingernails into the delicate flesh of whoever came up with the idea of individually labeling every piece of fruit.

Checkout clerks used to be able to tell the difference between a plum tomato and a hothouse tomato without having to look at a number, and would just enter the price and weight into the register. Now there are too many choices. Who can remember all the prices—which change each week, anyway—for every variety of tomato the store carries today?

Now, everything has to have a number; but it takes too long to have to look up the number for a plum tomato at checkout, so every plum tomato has to have a number already on it to keep the checkout lines moving right along.

Do you want to annoy a lot of people? Go to the produce department on a busy Saturday afternoon, pick out only those few tomatoes that have been overlooked in the labeling process, and check out in the twelve-items-or-less line. And then pay by check.

The time saved at the checkout line is more than lost at home, where you either have to painstakingly remove each tomato’s label, or eat it. I have been in restaurants that have served a slice of fresh fruit garnish, decorated with a piece of barcode label. Colorful, but tacky.

It has not come to the point where each grape and strawberry is individually labeled, but it sure is headed in that direction. Someone will make a fortune by genetically engineering plants to grow the produce number right into the fruit’s flesh.

This year, I’m going to make more of an effort to skip the produce section entirely and make trips to the farmers’ market. While they may not have avocados, the local growers will have plenty of other options throughout the season, most of which haven’t had time between harvest and market to go through any labeling machines.

Today, though, I’ll be having my 4664 and 4046 salad for lunch.