Old news, but could you tell (no cheating!), which cucumber is illegal to sell in the EU - number one or number two?
Yes, you were right - the number two is ‘guilty’. Commission Regulation (EEC) No 1677/88 states that Class I cucumbers (just like these two guys) must have an arc not higher than ‘10 mm per 10 cm of the length of cucumber’.
Higher arc? No sale.
If you were a farmer and would dare to rename your precious cucumbers to Class II, you would be allowed to have an arc up to 20 mm (twice bigger), but now they would be qualified as a second class (read: not that good) cucumbers by the buyer who is making the cucumber buying decision.
And what if The Arc is more than 20 mm, say, 21 mm? Could you still sell them? No. Could you donate them to food charity? No. So what then? Trash can. Yes, unless you can eat a couple of tonnes of cucumbers by yourself and your family, all you can to is to throw them out.
…and the regulation is called ‘laying down quality standards for cucumbers’. I mean, what does the term ‘quality’ has to do with the arc of a cucumber?
…but there are others. An article from The Daily Telegraph tells us that a guy in the UK had to waste 1000 kiwis last year just because they were 1 mm smaller than Brussels wanted them to be.
Thankfully, these regulations will be dropped from July. But seriously?.. It took about a year to undo this change. Don’t we need a little flexibility at these times?
(13 votes, average: 3.85 out of 5)
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