Sad death of the straight banana story?

After discussion with my teaching colleagues I came to the conclusion that stories of straight bananas juxtaposed with details of food mountains was a great way to get started on teaching the EU topic. So it was with a heavy heart that I read this story in the Sunday Times about EU plans to relax rules on what vegetables look like.

As the Sunday Times reports, various rules from Brussels include:

‘Class 1 cucumbers must be “practically straight” and their maximum bend must be at a gradient of no more than 1/10

Bananas must be bent – in Euro-speak, “the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces and the middle, perpendicular to the longitudinal axis . . . must be at a minimum of 27mm”. They must also be longer than 14 cm

A string of onions must consist of no fewer than 16 onions bound together

Class 1 green asparagus must be green for at least 80% of its length

A bunch of grapes must not weigh more than 1kg

Carrots must be at smooth and regular. If they are less than 20mm long, they must be called “early carrots” ‘

The truth behind the introduction of rules by an apparently power mad bureaucracy at Berlaymont was slightly more complex than the tabloid press would have us believe. The rules drawn up by the Commission were the result of pressure from traders across Europe who favoured standardisation in order to improve price/quality transparency. Nevertheless, the fine print of vegetable regulations was a good way to get debate going in class over what the EU meant, and why the UK is generally Eurosceptic.

Alas, the Commission wants to scrap many of the rules in response to concerns about high food prices and food shortages.