This Sticker Will Outlive You

Some things persevere, even after a year of composting. Fruit pits are common to find in compost, especially avocado pits and peach pits, though they do attract colonies of little worms eventually. Sometimes avocado shells can even survive, though they become brittle and crumble easily. Little wads of eggshell reliably turn up here and there, taking a couple years of weathering to give up their precious calcium.

But the eternal, unchanging and unwelcome resident of any compost pile is the produce sticker. The Price Look Up (or PLU) system was invented in 1990 to allow packers and retailers an easy way to grade, sort, and manage produce inventory. Each sticker has a four- or five-digit number, and these days often a UPC code, identifying the grade, origin, size, and type of produce, which can match up with price in a retailer’s system.

These stickers are typically glued to produce at the packer, using adhesive required to be “food grade” by the FDA. But despite appearances, the stickers themselves are not paper. The vast majority of PLU stickers are made with very thin sheets of plastic or vinyl to ensure they’re still legible when attached to wet produce, or when they go through produce misting or other ambient moisture. Because of this, they don’t decay in compost. Nor should you be eating them, as they can lodge in your body for a long time just as they do in the dirt. It’s theoretically possible for an undisturbed PLU sticker to take many decades or even centuries to break down.

Even industrial composting facilities are continually bedeviled by PLU stickers spoiling their otherwise deliciously rich and loamy earth. So I shouldn’t be surprised to keep finding them in my own compost bins, despite my patient personal removals and my relentless nagging of my less compost-intense family members. But now you know and have no excuse! Be vigilant and dispose of PLU stickers properly. They’re just as bad as microplastics, only bigger.

What is there to say about this past week? The prospect of a second Trump presidency fills me with despair, which is hardly uncommon. Post-election, after 48 hours of running through every terrible thing I imagine he’s likely to do, I found myself going numb, or rather just accepting a certain baseline note of despair as the new normal, again.

This is not just because of what Trump and his cronies will actually do. I also despair that the idea of America I had in my head was at least partly a fantasy. Or maybe the more pernicious fantasy is thinking myself a cynical and practical person, clear-eyed and hard-nosed about political and social realities, certainly neither naive nor sentimental. Yet I didn’t really believe until now that many and possibly most of my fellow Americans are quite comfortable supporting and inflicting misery at home or abroad. They either see it as a good thing, or see it as not mattering, and I’m not sure which is worse.

I didn’t comprehend, or didn’t want to comprehend, that a majority of America thinks this way now. So really my despair is just as much about my own willfull blindness, which is a remarkable way to make it all about me once again.

The damage a disagreeable president can do is vast, but not without limits. I don’t think those limits will come from Democrats, who are already consumed with retrenchment to protect their party infrastructure and financial ecosystem in exile. They will never clean house in a meaningful way even after a defeat of this magnitude, with this magnitude of consequence.

The limitations of Trump‘s ability to further wreck America will emerge from his own bad acts and blinkered narcissism, his compulsion to demand abject loyalty and never reward it for long. His administration will work like a thresher, just like last time, requiring the grist of politicians and citizens alike. The real question is just how long his political base will keep him in their hearts as so many of them get fed into the machine.