"sticker" news and stories

The nice thing about shopping at local farmers' markets is that they rarely mar their product with stickers that are hard to peel off and leave an unappealing, waxy residue.

But during the winter, many of us have no choice but to buy the stickered fruit. So, we should at least know how to identify our fruit by its sticker, right?

Ideal Bite kindly provided this short but effective tutorial:

• A four-digit number means it was conventionally grown
  
• A five-digit number beginning in "9" means it is organic
  
• A five-digit number beginning in "8" means it was genetically modified.
  

...and now you know.

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A University of Arizona professor is turning the process of selecting a price of fruit from "an art [to] a science." He has come up with a new way to help let people know when fruit is ripe and ready for eating, eliminating all that sniffing, poking and prodding of fruits in the market. His creation is a sticker called RediRipe that changes from white to blue as ethylene gas, a natural ripeness indicator, is released from the fruit or vegetable.

The first batch of the stickers will go straight to growers, who will be able to use them to monitor their crops and prevent spoilage of over-ripe fruits by shipping out the fruits ripening the fastest, first. It is worth mentioning that the stickers do not change to indicate overripe fruit themselves, so something that is "ripe" according to the sticker, may actually be too soft on the inside.

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