Buying Fruit, By The Numbers

Ever wonder what those PLU (Product Look-Up) numbers on the fruit you buy actually means? To be honest, we hadn't really either until we saw these two posts over on megnut who noticed this graph in the latest issue of Food & Wine:

"[T]he sticker labels on fruit: The numbers tell you how the fruit was grown. Conventionally grown fruit has four digits; organically grown fruit has five and starts with a nine; genetically engineered has five numbers and starts with an eight."

Huh. Now, don't you feel somehow better for knowing that? Remembering it when you are actually shopping for that organic piece of fruit might be a bit tricky of course, but what can you do? Snakes on a Plane, eh? In the meantime if you are interested in a full list of what each and every one of those PLU numbers mean you can find a very good adapted list here, or you can go and play around on the International Federation for Produce Coding's website here.

Plum detail from jennie333's flickr stream.