Pick Me! Fruit Crate Art and the California Dream

GOLDEN STATE ART: We're familiar nowadays with the pow-packing fruit crate label, specifically those labels that arose over a century ago. Think bright hues, almost fictionally luscious apples and berries, and the bold fonts of the company names. But think back to a day when people were not familiar with the California fruit label, and how, when a number of crates got loaded off a train in the Midwest or the snowy eastern capitals, how the colorful images must have wowed, then wooed. The California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento is looking back at those images, and the message of the beautiful, bountiful land out west they bore.

THROUGH MARCH 30, 2012: The museum has over 80 labels on display in Pick Me! Fruit Crate Art & the California Dream. Visitors will also learn about how the seedy sweet goods of our state were transported, back when transporting out of state was still something of a novel concept. The show's open for the next year, note. An adult admission to the museum is $9.

TODAY'S GOODS: What current product or foodstuff bears a label or package that has quite the same "move here" mystique? Nothing springs to mind, but surely, a hundred years from now, or two, something we pass by often and rarely think about will be in its own museum. Food -- or rather fruit -- for thought.

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