Another idea for you... Maintaining the two tables in sync is a hassle. I was just keying upon I would like to sort @food by putting all non-fruit at the end. Doesn't solve the ranking problem within FRUIT, I just used alpha sort.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

use constant FRUIT => 0;
use constant VEGGIE =>1; 


my @food;
push @food, { name => "apple",    type => FRUIT  };
push @food, { name => "banana",   type => FRUIT  };
push @food, { name => "orange",   type => FRUIT  };
push @food, { name => "broccoli", type => VEGGIE };
push @food, { name => "grape",    type => FRUIT  };


my @sorted = sort {  $a->{type} <=> $b->{type}
                                or
                     $a->{name} cmp $b->{name}
                   } @food; 

print Dumper(\@sorted);

__END__

$VAR1 = [
          {
            'name' => 'apple',
            'type' => 0
          },
          {
            'type' => 0,
            'name' => 'banana'
          },
          {
            'type' => 0,
            'name' => 'grape'
          },
          {
            'name' => 'orange',
            'type' => 0
          },
          {
            'type' => 1,
            'name' => 'broccoli'
          }
        ];
[download]

Update: As a practical matter, part of my thinking is that a data structure like this:

my %ranking = (
    1 => 0,
    2 => 1,
    5 => 2,
    10 =>3
);
[download]

will be very hard to maintain manually. Here it is possible. But if the tables grow to any size, it won't be feasible and some other structure will be needed to describe the rankings that a human can deal with.