You may like to use an enum, a way to bind an identifiers to integers:
enum Items {apple = 1, box, carnage, delicious};
and in your code, apple will work just like 1, box as 2 and so forth.
You may want to start thinking of zero as a perfectly good number; array indices run from 0 to N - 1 if N is the total number of elements in an array.
enum Items {apple, box, carnage, delicious};
where not saying where to start, the default is 0.
Most real code uses 0 .. N - 1, you may find some arguments about that.
And yes, less RAM intensive.
a7