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BRUSSELS - For years, the bent cucumber - alongside its maligned compatriot, the straight banana - has been wielded by Eurosceptics eager to clobber the European Union.
But Brussels bureaucrats are to usher in a new age of acceptance when it comes to knobbly fruit and vegetables, scrapping the rules dictating that only straight cucumbers can be sold in shops as "class one" fruit.
Misshapen and blemished fruit and veg are likely to find their way back on to supermarket shelves - although they may be labelled "for cooking", under reforms proposed by the EU's Danish agriculture commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel.
"People [are] saying that prices are too high, [so] it makes no sense to be chucking food away. We want to have two classes, allowing supermarkets to sell funny shaped vegetables," said EU spokesman Michael Mann.
Fischer Boel wants to abandon the eccentric rules that brought scorn on the EU and led to criticism that perfectly formed harvests had been achieved at the expense of taste.
The rules have created some enduring myths, such as the fiction that bent cucumbers are banned - in fact, under EU regulations, cucumbers with an arc of more than 10mm for every 10cm of length cannot be sold with a premium class one label.
Other rules also specify the diameter of carrots that can be sold as class one, unless they are officially regarded as baby carrots.
- INDEPENDENT
