Slippery (Like a Banana Peel) Slope

Today's post began as a comment on my pal Allie Cat's blog. But I was enjoying myself so much I decided to delete the comment and instead make it a post on my own blog. Is that wrong? I hope that's not wrong. It kind of feels like stealing, except they're my words, so it's a gray area.

Anyway, read Allie Cat's very entertaining post here. I'll wait.

Did you actually read it, or did you just scroll past the "Jeopardy" theme? I know how you are.

Anyway, the subject (or one of the subjects...it's kind of a rambling post, tbh, not that there's anything wrong with that, although I didn't really understand how safari shirts fit in with the whole thing, but whatever) was stickers on fruit.

Would stickers on fruit be like...prickly pears?
*dodges thrown tomatoes*

Back in the day, before every damn fruit and vegetable had its own special sticker, grocery store employees used to have to memorize produce codes, or at least learn the different types well enough to recognize them. I remember helping my sister memorize the codes when she got a job at a grocery store in high school. She eventually became a front-end manager, so I must have done a good job (of course, because it's all about me).

Bananas had stickers long before other types of produce, maybe because no one ever eats banana peels so it didn't matter that they hadn't perfected non-toxic glue yet.

Creating awareness of the need for non-lethal glue
is just one of the things we can thank "Seinfeld" for.
For which we can thank "Seinfeld." Whatever.

I was kind of obsessed with banana stickers when I was a teenager. Every time I ate a banana, I would save the sticker and put it on the headboard of my bed. Really. I now realize that this was a sad, nerdy-girl version of making notches on my bedpost. A terribly sad version, actually. My only conquests in high school were bananas, for God's sake.

If I'd made that mental connection years ago,
then today I'd either be much happier or dead.

I guess I ate a lot of bananas in those days, because I remember having a lot of banana stickers. It's possible I also made my friends give me the stickers from their bananas. I know what you're thinking: How is it possible that I never made it onto Homecoming Court in high school?

The world may never know.

Fast-forward to now, and the produce section is a veritable pride parade of colorful, self-identifying stickers. I for one welcome this sign of progress. First of all, the past few decades seem to have produced approximately 15,000 new varieties of fruits and veggies that either didn't exist before or hadn't yet been discovered by hipsters and subsequently filtered down to suburban moms with traumatizing memories of eating nothing but canned cling peaches and boiled carrots their entire childhood.

Secondly, Precocious Daughter likes apples, and there are lots and lots of kinds of apples, and there are also apparently lots of shoppers who are assholes when it comes to things like picking up random pieces of fruit, deciding they don't want them, and setting them down in the nearest bin, resulting in an anarchic and unholy mixing of your Galas with your Pink Ladies with your Braeburns.

It's a madhouse.

So I'm Team Produce Stickers. They ensure that not only are you not getting a tart apple when you expected a sweet one, but you're not paying $2.98 a pound for free-range organic bananas when all you wanted was a cheap on-the-go breakfast that you won't feel guilty about tossing when it turns into a flaccid brown mess because you decided to go for sausage rolls all week instead.

I'd like to end by reminding everyone that labeling is only effective if you pay attention. Otherwise you end up buying a head of cabbage rather than a head of lettuce. Not once, but twice in the space of a few months. And then throwing the cabbage away because who wants to eat that shit?

I'm trying to save the world here, people.

If you have any spare banana stickers, you're welcome to send them my way, or affix them to your bed. Either way...you too can be a sad specimen like teenage-me.

And isn't that what's important?