Must we label everything?

Fall is Marash Girl's favorite time of year!

At the local food co-op in Takoma Park, MD, while waiting for the school bus, Marash Girl was enjoying the fall display until she started to notice the labels.  Join her while she shares a bit of her experience. 

 

 

What is it that is so offensive about fresh vegetables defaced by stickers?

Is it like our milk that now comes in cartons on supermarket shelves rather than clear glass bottles delivered daily by Ferndale Dairy?  Is it that the vegetables no longer seem to come from God?  Is it that the labels insist on reminding us of the commercialism of the day? Is it simply that the labels interfere with the beauty of the vegetables?  Or is it that Marash Girl remembers gathering tomatoes and cucumbers from her dad's garden, and her own, without man made labels announcing what it was exactly that she was gathering?

But there was hope.

Ah, finally squash sans labels!

As you may have read in an earlier blog, when Marash Girl walked around to the back of the Co-op, she found a farmer with crates of apples sans labels, the way it was in the old days!  And to be fair, most of the squash pictured here had no labels, unlike the supermarkets where every single tomato is defaced by a sticky label announcing its origins.  But the trick is to try to remove the sticky label from the tomato without causing an abrasion and destroying the beauty and longevity of the tomato . . .