Matters of Grave Public Concern: Tattooed Fruit

Once again, Bostonist finds ourself woefully out of touch with the American mainstream. At least this time, it's not about politics or that crazy music the kids are listening to. Instead, it's produce, as in fruits and vegetables. We like produce and we like shopping for produce. Up to now, our only complaint about the purchasing of greens, fruits, and the like came on the rare occasions when the lateness of the hour forced us to go somewhere other than Market Basket. It turns out, however, that normal people are tremendously bothered by the little stickers on produce that tell the cashier what code to type in at the register. (We had always wondered how all the different growers managed to coordinate and agree on the same codes, but that didn't particularly bother us.)

Our first inkling that the stickers were the bane of everyone's shopping experience came when we heard about a new process for tattooing the relevant information on produce with a laser. "Lasers are cool," we thought to ourselves. "Applying laser technology to fruit is even cooler." Only after thinking for a while about the coolness of lasers did it occur to us that the advent of this "solution" meant that the stickers it was replacing were a problem. But we also know capitalism well enough to realize that sometimes people invent problems just to sell the solution. So we went back to thinking about lasers. But today, the Globe has seen fit to editorialize on the matter, weighing the tremendous inconvenience of removing stickers from produce (Bostonist just bites them off and spits them out) against the (apparently) unbearable, big-brother-esque, dystopian-Blade-Runner-supermarket feeling of laser-tattooed vegetables. The Globe prefers the stickers, choosing aesthetics over practicality. Bostonist, for our part, says, "Huh?" And, having said that, we turn to you, dear readers, to answer this question: Are the stickers such a big deal? Is the world so lacking in compelling issues that our city's paper of record must take their side, inconvenience notwithstanding, to protect us against (gasp!) advertising on fruit?

Photo (somewhat modified) courtesy of flickr.com / user: Kanko