Posted on 06/28/2002 5:25:52 PM PDT by Pokey78
I have mixed feelings about this week's landmark court decision striking down EU regulations on the curvature of fruit and veg. As a rule, I like my cucumbers straight and my bananas curved. I'm cool on EU regulation 1677/88 (if memory serves) requiring Class One cukes to curve less than 10mm every 10cm. But on bananas I'm a bender. The notorious EU regulation 2257/94 stating that bananas must be "free of abnormal curvature" and should be at least 5.5 inches long makes no sense, unless it was drafted by Paula Jones while still in shock.
But, frankly, I had no idea the EU were the ones in favour of uncurved bananas. I seem to remember during the "transatlantic banana split" of a few years ago that it was we in North America who were on the side of the straight banana and you in Europe who were the curvy ones. The banana war of the late Nineties was the turn-of-the-millennium version of those 19th-century imperial disputes where the Great Powers line up behind one obscure tribe or another and stage a proxy war. In this case, it was something to do with the different spheres of influence of Fyffes, Europe's banana supremo, and Chiquita, America's top banana. The US championed the cause of Latin-American bananas - these are the so-called "dollar" bananas: tall, straight, and thick-skinned, much like the Americans themselves. The Europeans, meanwhile, were on the side of Afro-Caribbean-Pacific bananas: short, bent, and with a pronounced aroma, much like the Europeans themselves.
Yet, despite the preceding slur, I'm personally drawn to the furtive, stooped, crooked European fruit. The dollar banana strikes me as pretty tasteless by comparison: it makes a witty and amusing touch for your headgear on Carmen Miranda night at the golf club, but is less effective in your standard banana cream pie. As I understand it, the only people in Europe who like straight bananas are the Germans, who lacking any former colonies in the Caribbean were obliged to import their bananas from Latin America (this may be why so many bigshot Nazis retired there). The biggest banana consumers in the world, the Germans have a psychologically complex relationship with the fruit. Konrad Adenauer famously brandished a banana in the Bundestag, calling it "paradisical manna", and thus became the only European politician to appear with a banana as a matter of policy until that monkey who got elected mayor the other week.
Yet, after reunification, West Germans referred to East Germans disparagingly as "bananen" because the delicacy had been so rare on the other side of the Berlin Wall ("Ja, ve haff nein bananen"). At the same time, the biggest-selling vibrator in Germany was a battery-operated banana and the biggest-selling condom was banana-flavoured. I gather there are EU regulations on the shape and size of condoms, so presumably the popular banana Eurocondom conforms to directives on both banana size and condom size. I don't believe the banana question would ever have reared its ugly head had not tariff-free dollar bananas for Germany been written into the original Treaty of Rome. Conversely, the rest of Europe's banana supply - almost entirely curved - was governed by the Banana Regime of the 1957 Lome Convention. The German banana exemption was the Trojan horse by which the straight banana penetrated the European hinterland.
And there things rested until the 1993 EU Banana Regime attempted to reconcile the curved bananas of the Lome Convention with the straight bananas of the Treaty of Rome and wound up getting taken to the WTO and infuriating the Americans. At the height of the subsequent banana war, Brussels was putting tariffs on straight bananas. With hindsight, it seems the height of hypocrisy to defend the curved banana against the straight banana when, on the equally vexed question of cucumber curvature, the EU instituted mandatory straightening.
In 1999, Washington demanded an investigation into EU policy on the crookedness of fruits, but at the time Brussels was too busy investigating the fruits of crookedness, with a half-hearted inquiry into EU corruption and cronyism. This was the period when Commissioner Edith Cresson was in trouble for putting her dentist on the payroll as a $300,000 EU "scientific adviser", and then declaring she was shocked to find this sort of thing going on right under her nose, though that would seem the obvious place to look for one's dentist. Mme Cresson, to the best of my knowledge, played no role in drafting EU policy on the identification of fruits, except for her celebrated remark that most Englishmen were homosexual.
Anyway, I asked an EU friend in Brussels (Motto: "You don't have to be bananas to work here but it helps") whether this week's news would be seen as a great victory for the fruitarian lobby. He said, "The fruit Aryan? You mean that Dutch guy who got shot a couple of weeks back? Nine-day wonder. We're over that now."
Finally, you're probably wondering how the straight vs curved banana dispute fits into the war on terror. All I know is that Muslims believe that man was expelled from the Garden of Eden not because of an apple but because of a green banana. Where does the EU stand (or slip) on those?
But, isn't that supposed to be funny?
European laws which insisted that cucumbers and bananas could not be excessively curved and had to be of a certain shape were ruled "unenforceable" by the High Court yesterday.
Reversing two decades of regulations regarded by many as an affront to common sense, Lord Justice Rose said that EU quality grading standards imposed since 1973 were "unknown to law".
The ruling stripped the Government of many of its powers for controlling the shape, quality and description of fruit and vegetables.
After the hearing, lawyers for Asda supermarkets, which faced 14 charges under the regulations, said that food grading rules made after 1973 "covering almost everything that is on sale" were now unenforceable.
The Government immediately applied to the High Court for a Certificate of Public Importance enabling it to bring an appeal to the House of Lords as a matter of urgency.
Asda and one of its managers, Graham Godley, were accused of failing to comply with a number of EU regulations, made between 1981 and 1999, concerning the quality standards of fresh fruit and vegetables at its store in Fareham, Hants.
These included accusations of damaged Iceberg lettuces, a proportion of aubergines being either not fresh or dirty, no country of origin or quality class was indicated on oranges and lemons, plums lacking indication of country of origin, class or marking and cooking apples not marked with their variety.
All the charges were dismissed last November by District Judge Woollard, who said they related to alleged breaches of EC regulations made between 1981 and 1999, but those regulations had not been in force when the 1964 Agriculture and Horticulture Act was introduced, or when the 1973 amendment regulations came into force by virtue of the 1972 European Communities Act.
Domestic legislation had failed to allow for any subsequent addition to, or amendment of, the Community grading rules, he said.
Relying on an earlier High Court ruling in the 2001 case of the Ministry of Agriculture v Mayne and Chitty Wholesale Ltd, the judge said shops and stores that breached the post-1973 regulations could not be successfully prosecuted.
Lord Justice Rose, upholding the district judge's decision yesterday, said the courts were entitled to follow the principles enunciated in Mayne and Chitty.
He said District Judge Woollard "was not wrong to conclude that the offences charged [against Asda] were unknown to law".
The victory was particularly sweet for Asda, which in 2000 urged the European Commission to reconsider applying its "confusing" regulations on curved cucumbers. Rule 1677/88 said a cucumber could only be given a premium Class One label if it curved less than 10mm every 10cm.
A 1994 ruling drew accusations of "Euro lunacy" after it attempted to regulate the curves in bananas.
A spokesman for Asda supermarkets said: "There is absolutely no crusade on our part, but we welcome the fact that the courts have looked at the position and come to the same conclusion as our lawyers.
"We will continue very vigorously indeed to defend the allegations that have been made against us. Had we been found guilty, we would have been fined up to £70,000 and one of our employees could have been imprisoned."
If any further appeal fails, the only way for the Government to give legal effect to the regulations - many of which are considered to provide necessary protection for the consumer - will be to amend the existing legislation.
An EU spokesman said the rules, which classify food by shape, size and quality, were aimed at upholding food standards, but they had been pilloried in Britain as the work of meddling "Eurocrats".
A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which brought the prosecution, said: "We will continue to pursue this case.
"We have lost on a technicality of law but not on the underlying principle."
Bless you for this ping - I'm forever in your debt.
I love Steyn's writing.
Monty Python were ahead of their time. This reads like one of their shows, except that it is deadly serious to those pinheads in Brussels.
And you don't think this is funny?
You can say that again..
I think my opinion runs right along the lines of post #4
Statist douche bags with nothing better to do than fret over the curvature of a banana. (how long before the EU implodes? A decade, or less?)
But the very thought of "banana nazi's" sucks the laughter right out of it.
THE BANANA MAN!!!
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