It's been the most popular joke about EU overregulation: desk-bound European Commission bureaucrats sitting in Brussels with nothing better to do than regulating the shapes and sizes of fruit and vegetables.

Until now, the EU only granted space on supermarket shelves for norm-fitting vegetables or fruit, but starting July 1, strange shapes and sizes are allowed back.

"July 1 marks the return to our shelves of the curved cucumber and the knobbly carrot," EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said.

"It makes no sense to throw away perfectly good products, just because they are the 'wrong' size and shape," she added.

20 years of strict rules on cucumber's curvature

But for the last twenty years, the EU has been throwing away "perfectly good products," with strict regulations that divided fruit and vegetables into classes depending not only on their quality but also appearance.

The criteria included, for instance, the degree of curvature of cucumbers and the smoothness of carrots.

The idea behind the legislation was to make it easier for EU consumers to compare products, but the regulation ended up becoming the most popular jibe at EU micro-regulation and bureaucracy overkill.

Last November, the 27 EU nations gave the green light for lifting the regulation. In all, standards for 26 fruits and vegetables are being scrapped, including apricots, eggplant, cherries, garlic, melons, and spinach.

"This is a concrete example of our drive to cut unnecessary red tape. We don't need to regulate this sort of thing at the EU level," Boel said.

Standards remain for 10 products

Standards are, however, kept in place for 10 products, including some of the most popular in European kitchens: apples, citrus fruit, kiwi, lettuce, peaches and nectarines, pears, strawberries, sweet peppers, grapes and tomatoes.

Those ten account for three quarters of the value of the EU's fruit-and-vegetables trade and will still have to conform to standard shape and size and pass some visual tests before they're sentoff to the supermarkets.

Nevertheless, even these ten can dodge Brussels' watchful eye if they are sold with an appropriate label, alarming the consumer about their shortcomings in terms of shape and size.

"In other words, the new rules will allow national authorities to permit the sale of all fruit and vegetables, regardless of their size and shape," the EU Commission said in a statement.

ai/dpa/Reuters/AFP
Editor: Kate Bowen