Innovation keeps business healthy by matching people’s needs as they change, promoting natural selection through adaptation.. In agriculture, redesigning fruit and vegetables is a biological imperative, because nature abhors consistency and adores adaptation.
Now once upon a time the socialists who run Amerika had reduced our food supply to the limits of bread being Wonder and Cheese being Velveeta. Wine was Lancers. That is it, folks, nothing to see, keep moving.
It got to the point that 40% of the produce department sales were in potatoes and apples, and the two kinds of apple were red delicious and golden delicious. Nature abhors stasis so much that ever-renewed varieties end up tasting like sawdust, and important benefits, like micro-doses of cyanide you get from eating the seeds are rendered empty too.
It is impossible to take the seed out of an apple and plant it and get the same fruit off the new tree. Of the six seeds in the apple, each seed would give you a different apple tree, again, none of which would be the original whence the seed came. Whatever fruit you might get, it is also likely to be inedible.
Among apples, occasionally a tree would produce a fruit that is edible. In that case, the only way to gt more of the same is to graft a branch of that tree onto another apple root stalk. All apples in the store came from a tree made by grafting edible fruit branches on other stock. Man has done this for millennia.
A few hundred years ago Gregor Mendel figured out how to hybridize, so we take white peas and red peas and get pink peas. Or take attributes of apples and turn them into specialized apples. Big breakthrough, that.
That Gregor Mendel revolutionized food production by studying the science of inheritability, adaptation and hybridization is largely unknown. Working at the same time, Darwin developed a balderdash hypothesis of evolution and is world famous. This is another example of where good ideas fail to gain prominence and bad ideas get adapted by the powers that be to serve the powers that be.
Anyway, nature so abhors consistency that when entire orchards of one kind of apple tree, say Braeburn, are growing to fruition, a few trees will go “sport.” And that is an apple no one ever saw before will grow on that tree, completely contrary to all efforts at uniformity. If that sport is attractive, then that too will be grafted and we have a new fruit.
Now, such natural progression cannot be patented, so those who hate mankind look to intellectual property rights as a way to patent a kind of fruit so not only can no one else sell it, you cannot even grow one. Wicked.
Nature screams “have variety!” and BigAg/BigGovt will get violent if you trade raw milk or offer other than velveeta, or grow your own to share, or use a "patented" ag item. Raw cheese an milk variesmany ways each batch, all for the good. Govt says you must drink pasteurized (dead), homogenized (same) milk. Very wicked.
Populations are easier to dominate if they have less food to eat and less choice. Standing in line becomes a purpose in life. So it was not accidental that 40% of produce sales were potato and apples, one kind. Small biz innovators brought us variety and better quality and nutrition. In the 1950s there were "Cheese conspiracies" where small groups would import god cheese and split it up in someone's home. Some of these efforts grew into food chains.
But the varieties caused a problem inasmuch as the cashier/checkers could not tell one apple or potato from another, so for expediency would just ring them up as the cheapest. Stores lost money selling better fruit and veggies.
How to solve this problem? With something called PLU codes. They name all fruits and veggies so when a clerk enters the code the computer knows the item and gives the price. Just print codes on labels and apply them to the fruit and veggies.
You can download the code book here.
So, put the codes on paper labels on the fruit, at random, say every three or 4 pieces, and they are marked enough for the store to find the plu when checking you out. Hard to do by hand, so applicator guns were invented.
Hand applying labels became way too time consuming. And it was a competitive advantage for the packers to sell the fruit pre-labelled. So machines to apply them were invented. Early machines crushed fruit, so later machines were developed to be gentler.
The PLU codes ended up getting eaten, to the chagrin of moms, so the code label stock was redesigned to be of soy “paper and ink.” Now edible.
Next the labels were doggone sticky, and hard to pull off if that is what you wanted. So the labels were changed from round to pear shaped. The round part had glue and he little part had no glue. Therefore you could easily lift the little part to pull off the whole label.
OK... but the OCD market in USA is huge, so, I am not making this up, there are labels that dissolve into soap when you wash the fruit. The ways you can make a buck in USA!
But wait, all that paper is ugly and kind of a waste, so how about skipping the paper and just printing on the fruit itself?
And then there are people who seek out organic, and spurn frankenfoods, so what to do for them? Include the info in the code itself.
Now, because there are small business entrepreneurs, the innovators,we have much wider variety. in time the conservators will adapt the innovations, apply their economies of scale, and the result will be more better cheaper faster to teh poit the poorest person will have the benefit of our innovation.
Innovate, on, Garth.
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