While washing that apple, with your fingers hugging its skin and the expectation of sweetness energising your inner grin, you may have plucked off a sticker attached to it.
Some of you tend to even remove it while purchasing the fruit at the supermarket. The stickers - mostly common in apples and oranges - are known as the price look-up codes.
They are usually helpful to customers who are keen on the type of fruits that they want to eat.
While the stickers may not be so common in other stores, the government may soon use the stickers to identify Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) food products following the ratification of the ban on farming technology.
Apart from detailing whether the fruit was grown from GMO seeds, the codes also indicate how the fruit was grown.
One can also use the stickers to identify whether the fruits were organically grown or whether pesticides were used.
Globally, the PLU codes contain a series of numbers that distinguish the various origin of the fruit.
If the fruit has four numbers, it means that the fruit was grown conventionally which pesticides used during plantation.
Stickers that have five codes usually indicate that the fruit is genetically modified.
In most cases, fruits that are genetically modified will have codes beginning with the number eight. On the other hand, fruits with five codes that begin with nine indicate that the fruit was organically grown.
Organically grown fruits are fruits that were grown without the use of chemicals usually used in farming.
They include chemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides.
