I took this photo a few days ago while grabbing some new pictures for my aunt’s B&B website. It’s a little grainy (I refuse to use the flash), but how fantastically oil painting-esque.
However, like an uncanny valley of still-life, like poorly executed subsurface scattering, the PLU sticker on the orange compromises the believability.
It ruins my photographic trick, and leaves white smeary sticker crud on my fruit, but apparently these stickers are also informative. (The white sticker crud is food-grade, by the way. The sticker is not.) According to Everything2 (and confirmed elsewhere), the PLU codes on those tiny ubiquitous annoyances can tell you a little something about the fruit you’re buying. The four-digit numbers are standardized codes for the type of produce (e.g. banana is 4011), and a “9” in front means organic, while an “8” means genetically modified.
How much of a nerd am I if I ask the EF to “grab me a 94011 from the kitchen while you’re up?”