The Delightful Site Dedicated to Ranking Plastic Bread Labels

Lately, I've been spending time collecting plastic tags from bagged pastries and sorting them into little piles of Latin names like Palpatophora utiliformis and Tridentidae.

This is an activity that seems to deserve a *record scratch* *freeze frame*: You're probably wondering how I got into this situation.

It all started one snowy winter night when I stumbled upon HORG.com, whose home screen features an official-looking seal bearing a bread label design — one of those plastic that grocery stores use to keep bags closed — and the Latin phrase Fiat Divisa Panem (loosely translated: "Let it be sliced ​​bread").

HORG stands for Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group. This is a self-proclaimed "synthetic taxonomy database" dedicated to plastic bread labels, referred to on the site as occlupanidae (this derives from occlu >, meaning "near", and pan, meaning "bread").

John Daniel

It categorizes the bread tags into 17 different families, with names like Haplognathidae and Mycognathidae, and then divides the gizmos by genus and species, for a total of 208 separate elements. types (excluding "Pseudo-occlupanids", which have a "highly disputed" taxon that some "occlupanologists" find "too close for cladistic comfort")

Some are important in Japan; others are in "a chilled niche" and "may prefer cooler environments". My favorite is the Spinosacculidae, a rare purple found near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, with an "oral groove" that looks like a turtle.

HORG oscillates between a serious scientific effort and an elaborate hoax. The species descriptions take on the formal tone of a field notebook, except for a few playful winks. Take the description of Eurycomplector labiopictus, which are printed with small images of lips: "The spot-like markings...may indeed be a form of camouflage, similar to the spots on a leopard. "

HORG bills itself as a distinguished collection of scientists, but in reality, the "Board of Taxonomy" is just John Daniel, a specialist in infographics and visualization in the San Francisco Bay Area in in his fifties who has meticulously cataloged plastic detritus since 1994. In college, he studied vertebrate zoology and sculpture. Although he is not a practicing biologist, he tells me that he is "absolutely obsessed with the natural world".

"It really struck me how strangely biomorphic it looks, like a larval parasite with claws. Why doesn't anyone notice these things?"

"Paying attention to things that are ignored, unloved or downright hated is something I find appealing - from ticks to butterflies to earwigs," Daniel says via Zoom from his home office, where he proudly hung a framed display of occlupanids.

Like most of us, he's encountered bread labels all his life. But he didn't see them - really see them — until he was 24 and saw "that little plastic thing" on the floor of someone's apartment. "It really struck me how oddly biomorphic it looks, like a larval parasite with claws," he says. "Why doesn't anyone notice these things?"

At that time, "the blinders fell off", h...