Fried green tom-hey-toes

A couple of weeks back, they broadcasted a reportage on the news about using laser to mark tomatoes instead of the usual paper stickers. Days later, all supermarkets had those tattooed evil tomatos. The idea doesn't sound bad at all... reality is that they rotten much faster than normal.

There are always 3 items on our fridge: tomatoes, cheese and coca-cola. We have never had to throw away rotten tomatoes before. My question is: "have they done any tests before deciding to tatoo all existing tomatos?" Seems that they didn't. And that, is a very important step of the whole "immaterial design process", or any other other design process for that matter. It was a mistake to release a technology without looking at the consequences.

And the moral is: just because a technology is available, it doesn't mean that you have to use it for everything. Just because it "looks cool" (and it's cheaper) to have tatooed tomatos, it doesn't mean that they can justify selling them for 5NZD a kg, when they rotten faster than normal (see picture and/or these posters). I guess it's just a matter of time before they call the whole thing off and we go back to the "unknown calories per paper sticker". Meanwhile, you can play this fun games from "tomatos are evil".

Maybe, one day we're all going to become TomAhToes, and get a laser barcode tattooed I.D. for traveling overseas... it's probably cheaper ("chipper") than the RFID implant like the Chipsons. And it would certainly be more effective than the census forms! Maybe they will give us the option to chose an alternative design to desguise it, or you can get the typical "mom tattoo"... or is it "big brother"? Anyway, Maori are supposedely the inventors of tattoo. It's called "Ta Moko" but for them it's not an ornament. Anyway, back to the laser tattoos; You can also use laser to put a tattoo on your powerbook... Check it out!

Speaking of superficiality, I hope you like the new look of my blog. I always wanted to match the look with the rest of my site, but never had the time. Now that I am learning CSS to design the website for specialkiwis, I used my blog as experiment.

ciao