Comment by ssl-3
4 hours ago
It's worth noting that Taylor Farms consumer bagged salads are consistently marked, in the form of an alphanumeric code printed on the bag near the sell-by date.
When this code begins with TF (like, say, the TFRB182A11B I had on a bag in my fridge last month), it's a Taylor Farms product.
They control a huge percentage of this market. Their products can be hard to avoid, and are sold under a wide variety of different brand names. But again: They're all marked with TF.
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It's also worth noting that there's some brand names that are never products of Taylor Farms.
Dole is the only example that I can find in stores near me (Ohio), but there may be others wherever you are. (Food distribution is often very regionalized.)
It boggles my mind that people would buy salads in bags. Instead of just a head of lettuce like the rest of the world.
It boggles my mind that people think that salad contains only lettuce. My world is much more flavorful than that.
I like my salad with a mixture of leafy greens, maybe with some radicchio or red cabbage for contrast, and perhaps some snow peas, radishes, and shredded carrots. I can keep all of that stuff around at the house and keep it fresh and prep it all, and that sounds very nice in theory -- except, most of it will probably rot before it gets consumed.
Or I can just buy a bag of salad and eat some of it at my whim.
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I'm further astounded that people bother with complaining about someone else's choice of food. It's not like I broke into your wallet and used your money to buy bagged salad that I then replaced the contents of your food with.
Bagged salad isn't your issue; it isn't an issue at all.
What motivates you to make fun of me in this way, fellow HN user?
> like the rest of the world.
Are the motivations political? It's just a salad.
It’s much more polluting (why wrap salad in a plastic bag?), promotes bacteria growth (and disease like in the present case), and further removes us from food in its original form. Of course you’re to spend your money however you see fit, that’s not the issue.
> It's worth noting that Taylor Farms consumer bagged salads are consistently marked, in the form of an alphanumeric code printed on the bag near the sell-by date.
This reads like C strings having not only a null terminator but carrying around a lifetime value specified in microseconds, and memory safety errors leading to weeks of explosive diarrhea.
How important is iceberg to your diet that you needed to create this YOLO lettuce header (heh)?
Serious question: Have you ever really looked at the packaging of the food products that you buy at the store?
Including some manner of descriptive coding isn't necessarily universal, but it has nonetheless been a normal way of doing things for a very long time.
It's similar to email headers or ip:port pairs in that it's hidden in plain sight. It's also similar in that most folks just don't notice them, and wouldn't care if they did notice them.
For instance: Plain old soda cans, which my dad made countless billions of during his career. There was a time when a person could show him a random 12oz soda can and there was a very strong chance that he'd be able to identify its origin by looking at it.
And I don't mean just the company that produced it, or the specific manufacturing plant within that company.
He could deduce the date of production, the on which it was produced, the bodymaker within that line that did the metal stamping, whether it was made during the day or night shift, and (with a calendar) which crew was working during that particular shift.
And that's just the can itself.
The origin of the contents of the can are also generally available for anyone with the right knowledge to observe, usually with videojet printing on the can's dome. He wasn't in the can-filling business so he wasn't much help with those codes, but they were present.
But again, on any normal day: No normal person ever even notices the presence of this information.
How important to your diet is that lettuce? Do you want to get fat eating bread all the time or can you stick your burger on that lettuce leaf? Done.
The header is the standard, which allows us to even have this conversation about tracking sources.
Not really. Lettuce has virtually zero nutritional value.