The Difficulty With Those Little Stickers on Apples

Yes, I’m talking about the actual fruit and not your phone.

Photo by IamCristian on Unsplash

It’s utterly disparaging when I buy apples from the supermarket these days because most of them are, individually, ‘decorated’ with a small paper sticker glued to the skin telling me the apple variety, who is presenting it to me, occasionally some barcode or other, and even a little flag to boot.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s tremendous that we’ve (mostly) moved on from plastic bags, plastic coated packaging, polystyrene, and depleted uranium casings¹ that apples use to come in and that the more progressive apple suppliers are either having small paper (recyclable) containers or just selling them loose, as the should be.

But, please, stop putting stickers on the damn fruit.

1. They’re irritating to take off, primarily as I have shorter nails, so I have to resort to using a knife to lever them upward before trying to pull them off the skin of the fruit.
2. My fingers (and usually the knife, if engaged) therefore get covered in sticky residue from the sticker which has to be scraped and washed off with soap. Either that or I end up pulling off some of the peel and exposing the fruit prematurely.
3. The apple then has to be rigorously washed to remove said residue.