General Chat

Curly cucumbers, crooked carrots and mottled mushrooms - odd-looking fruit and vegetables are making a comeback as 20-year-old EU rules are lifted.

Marketing standards for 26 types of produce have been scrapped, in a drive to cut EU bureaucracy.

The standards will remain in place for 10 of the most popular types. But with an appropriate label shops will be able to sell "ugly" specimens of these too.

The European Commission's move has been welcomed by supermarkets.
More:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8127461.stm
Brian(i)

Morning Brian, I wondered about that, because when we went to France, or Spain and went into local shops or on the fruit and veg stalls, it is as it was years ago, fruit etc. all shapes and sizes........and last year in a Spanish supermarket I noticed that the fruit and veg were not as regular and uniform as ours.....

.....I thought that we always seem to follow rules to the letter, whereas others are more lax....

I have a friend who sells free range eggs from her chickens in her farm shop, and the irregular or misshapen ones she keeps to one side for friends and family........I love these eggs, the only difference is the size, or the shells are irregular....

sally

Perhaps the fruit and vegetable growers will now grow their produce for the flavour instead of regular shape.

It was a stupid idea so I am pleased they have now changed the standards.

Maureen

Excellent point, Maureen. I can't help but wonder if they've sort of had to do it to try to help growers and farmers during this recession. It always seemed a bit out of touch and mad to me that somebody could come up and more or less say, "I know this is your livelihood but you've pulled up a million carrots and you can't sell 200,000 because they're the wrong shape/size".

Maybe the EU has realised they can't be that picky at the moment.

I know someone who deals with the fruit and veg. packing farms in this country. The wastage is unbelievable, because for instance, when green beans are packed for the supermarkets, each one has to be the exact length, and it is the same with the asparagus. All the rest is rejected and thrown away.
Julia in Derbyshire

hi it was a stupid thing to have in the first place think the world is going mad sometimes and as everyone is saying such a waste of food

I thought at first you were talking about these lol

An ugli fruit (pronounced /ˈʌɡli/ "oo-glee") is a Jamaican tangelo, a citrus fruit created by hybridizing a grapefruit (or pomelo according to some sources) and a tangerine. Its species is Citrus reticulata x Citrus paradisi
It was discovered growing wild in Jamaica where it is mainly grown today.[citation needed] Its name derives from the unsightly appearance of its rough, wrinkled, greenish-yellow skin, wrapped loosely around the orange pulpy citrus inside.[1] The light green surface blemishes turn orange when the fruit is at its peak ripeness. An ugli fruit is usually slightly larger than a grapefruit (but this varies) and has fewer seeds. The flesh is very juicy and tends towards the sweet side of the tangerine rather than the bitter side of its grapefruit lineage, with a fragrant skin. The taste is often described as more sour than an orange and less bitter than a tangerine, however, and is more commonly guessed to be a lemon-tangerine hybrid. The fruit is seasonal from December to April. It is distributed in the USA and Europe between November and April, and is on occasion available from July to September.

The fruit is also described as an exotic tangelo. Ugli fruit are sold under two different brand names: Uniq Fruit which is a registered trademark of Brooks Tropicals, LLC. and UGLI which is a registered trademark of Cabel Hall Citrus Ltd.




I think it's great we can have curly cucumbers and such back again, I have had some odd shaped strawberries recently but didn't think much about it, as long as they taste ok I am happy with any shape lol

Maybe commonsense is returning to the world at last!
Lizxx

We were on holiday in Brussels a couple of years ago and it was interesting to see how many of the stupid EU rules we so rigidly follow over here didn't apply there.

Funny that.