Légufrulabelophile is an art book collection of 398 unique produce stickers. The stickers were collected from 14 different stores and supermarkets around Stanford, CA (in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Los Altos) in spring 2023.
As varied as they are, every produce sticker is standardized by numeric code. This code corresponds to the specific type of fruit or vegetable (Pink Lady Apple or Roma Tomato) and the type of system that produced it (conventional or organic). Past that, they diverge. Some are large, some are small. Many are designed to proudly display the name of the item’s producer or distributer and where it is located. Others are decidedly plain, even ambiguous.
Produce stickers are commonly described as “non-toxic” or “edible”, in that you could eat them (you could eat a lot of things), but they are made of vinyl and glue and are not compostable, nutritious, nor delicious. They are generally compliant for contact with food but I wouldn’t recommend ingesting them. Better to collect them instead.
The process of collecting these stickers got me thinking about where in the world our food is grown, its journey to stores, and the illusion of choice presented to consumers shopping at those stores. If I visited more than one grocery (for example, Trader Joe’s and Safeway) on the same day, I often saw the exact same produce by the exact same suppliers represented in the crates and displays.
Week to week, the array of produce available at any one store might have also appeared not-so-different to that of the week prior, but looking at the stickers revealed a different story—and made visible the huge amount of labor and governance that dictates which farms gets to feed us on which day, a rhythmic force which seemed to pass over the regional geography of stores in waves.
