The nicest apples are “Spartan”.

Alex,
Why a Catholic would demand a Proddie phone system is beyond me.

The difference is that there are no compatability problems when it comes to carrots.

Thank God you don’t work in telecoms, Tim; I can just see you at ETSI-TISPAN, barking “I demand a common-law telephone system for a Protestant people! If you’re setting protocols to work across Europe, you will inevitably use alien Roman engineering as the basis to do so.”

“I’m sorry. It has not been possible to connect your call. Please try again later. I’m sorry. It..”

Both of these are covered in:
“Back, in short, to the old common law idea that goods must be fit for the purpose and of merchantable quality.”

Roman Law in Scotland and Common in England and Wales. Yes, I’d forgotten that point but doesn’t obviate mine. As the EU is setting laws for the entire EU they are inevitably using Roman as the basis to do so. There must be such definitions written into law for other wise how would people know what they may do? To which the Common law answer is “Whatever the law does not say they may not do”.

“for the purposes of this Directive, tomatoes, the edible parts of rhubarb stalks, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons and water-melons are considered to be fruit,”

Yes, I know – I could hardly have read the piece I linked to without reading that text, could I? It doesn’t say what you say it does. It defines jam as made from fruit, then adds a clause to cater for exceptional cases where something which can reasonably be considered as jam is made of something other than fruit. The alternative would be to replace all occurrences of ‘fruit’ with ‘fruit (or other recognised primary jam constituent as listed in Annex A)’, and that would have caused just as many jokes.

The solution is simple. Any and every trade organisation can draw up a list of what it considers to be an acceptable definition of
whatever. But the law stays well clear of it, allowing people to decide whether their bananas/jam meet the standards of a specific
such body or not. And they be free to sell them and people be free to buy them even if they meet the standards of no organisation.

You’re almost making sense but not quite. As my mother used to say, “Little drops of water, little grains of sand/Make the milkman mighty and the grocer grand”. There’s a role for the state in setting minimum standards on behalf of purchasers; arguably European and national governments are doing too little of this type of intervention (cf. Super Size Me, Jamie’s School Twizzlers etc). We as a society should be able to decide that we don’t want to have crap sold to us dressed up as food. But straight-cucumber regulation isn’t about that at all, and isn’t conducted in the interests of purchasers. (Incidentally, thanks for the cite, dearie – I was going to include something about the single European cucumber, but I couldn’t find any evidence in time.)

The system is evidently rotten and corrupt, you’ll be telling me they have Court of Human Rights next.