You're at the grocery store and looking for some fruit. Hey, these apples look and feel pretty crunchy, bet it's fresh. Wait a sec, you eye those juicy, plump white peaches. Oh actually, across the way, I can just taste that sweet and drippy mango! Drool.
Welcome to Summer!!! Summer heat just draws us (or I should say, me) to eating fruit all the time. Sweeter and juicier, the better.
Awesome to see all this fruit, but if you are like me and want to avoid eating genetically modified all the time, well actually, eat it never the time, you might want to know that the numbers on the little sticker actually mean something and tell you how that piece of fruit came into existence. That is, how it was reared.
The little sticker helps with the checkout process, but the numbers also represent the PLU code, or price lookup number in the U.S. Here's how the system works:
For conventionally grown fruit (grown with chemical pesticides), the PLU code consists of four numbers.
For organically grown fruit (which also may have pesticides but not as much), the PLU code consists of five numbers, prefaced by the number 9.
For genetically-modified (GM) fruit, the PLU code consists of five numbers, prefaced by the number 8.
If that was too hard to follow (don't worry, I felt the same at first too), here are visual examples.
Take a banana for instance.
Conventionally grown banana would read: 4011
Organic banana: 94011
Genetically modified or engineered (GMO, GE, GM) banana: 84011
So the next time you are at the grocery store, take a look, and decide how your fruit should grow up... Just remember, don't eat the stickers!
Source: www.plantea.com
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