Read the numbers on your fruit

Another little tidbit gleaned from April's Food & Wine: those sticker numbers on your fruit actually mean something. Here in the US, fruit often comes with stickers on it, sometimes telling you where it's from and/or what it is. There's also a number, but I never paid attention to that. But on p. 72 I spotted this interesting bit of information:

"[T]he sticker labels on fruit: The numbers tell you how the fruit was grown. Conventionally grown fruit has four digits; organically grown fruit has five and starts with a nine; genetically engineered has five numbers and starts with an eight."

Yesterday I checked out the organic apples at the market, and yes, the numbers did indeed have five digits and started with a nine. Pretty handy, if you can remember it. I'm not sure whose bright idea it was to have the genetic numbers and the organic numbers the same length and begin only one digit off. Seems like a potential source for confusion. I'm remembering it this way: organic is better than genetically engineered (IMO) and nine is a bigger number than eight, therefore it's "better." Uh, yeah. That's honestly what I came up with to differentiate the two.

Posted on March 14, 2006

copyright © 1999-2007 Megnut LLC      archives | about | contact | home