The EU did indeed ban the sale of wonky veg; they had to repeal this however in about 2009 in order to not look even more silly than they normally do, because of the recession. At the time, of course, they said it was because of extraordinary times, blaa blaa blaa, but they never brought them back in post recession, because it was obvious how stupid it was and what an open goal for the likes of UKIP it was. I'm surprised the pro-EU members on here didn't know that, being big fans n all.
No, they didn't ban wonky veg. The tabloids certainly
said that they did, and a lot of people believe that they did. Jamie Oliver in particular got all wound up by it, but he too fell victim of the propaganda. There have always been restrictions for fruit and veg and each country had their own, and in order to make sure that producers from different member states could trade easily with each other, the EU introduced standards on an ad hoc basis so that producers could use these standards to classify their produce and then buyers could know that they conformed to a certain standard regardless of where they bought them from. Take a look at the law that applied to cucumbers (
link here). Scroll to page 5 and you can see the minimum requirements, i.e. the things that were actually banned, are things like it not being rotten to the point of being unfit for human consumption, not being infested with pests, not contaminated. As you can see, wonky cucumbers were never banned. However if you look at the next section you can see that the top two classes, the premium grade stuff, did have specifications about curvature. What this means is that it would be illegal to sell the wonky cucumbers and label them as 'extra class' or 'class I'. This is very different from actually banning them. Nevertheless, something so mundane doesn't sell newspapers, so it was spun as a ban, it became "common knowledge" and people got upset over nothing. Even The Guardian was duped. Sainburys even exploited the Euroskeptic public mood and pulled off a publicity stunt saying that they would have sold wonky veg at 40% cheaper, but didn't because their store managers could be prosecuted, forgetting to mention that all they had to do was write "class II" on the label. We know that this was a stunt, because when supermarkets did start selling wonky veg, they sure as hell weren't 40% cheaper.
Later, the EU marketing regulations were unified into a single law (
linky link), which makes it easier to debunk this lie, because you can scroll down to your veg of choice and easily see that the minimum requirements, as opposed to the specific class requirements, are all obvious things that were already in British law anyway. Not to mention that many of the requirements were actually lifted from British law, the British helped drafting these regulations, they were voted for by the British MEPs, and if Britain didn't like them then they could always have these laws changed in Brussels, which is exactly what happened when the regulations were lifted a decade ago. I think it is probably worth mentioning that if, in fact, the regulations were causing all this food wastage as the Euroskeptics would have you believe, then when they were lifted you would expect food wastage to go down. It didn't. I think that says it all.
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