Stickers on fruits

After death and taxes, my next pet-peeve is stickers on fruits. I feel it’s time to remove them once and for all. I’m not talking about the “real” fruits we purchase each week at the farmer’s market, but those we find at the grocery store or the warehouse club. The main reason why I despise these little labels so much is that we must remove stickers from the fruit before composting. If you drop the peels into the composting bin without removing the pesky stickers you'll end up with a bin that is half-full with paper and half-full with peels that refuse to decompose in such a promiscuous space. Can someone tell me what the use of these annoying stickers is? They hardly give you the country of origin, date of production, or even the produce serial number (if we ever needed one.) With the 1,000 plus bananas that I prepare each morning in the course of a year (see my June 1, 2007, blog) I have to peel away between 300 and 500 stickers off the yellow fruits. That’s a lot of work and time in the… bin. Since we have to be constructive, I suggest that if markings are indeed necessary, we should go back to stamping the fruit (remember, yesterday's oranges?) or bio-engineer the labels into the fruit DNA or even beam a laser marking on produce sitting on the store display. What’s your solution to that existential problem?