Solving the Euro Puzzle : A Matter of Measures

Asked in the 1977 comedy film “Oh, God” whether he had ever made a mistake, George Burns as the deity, admits he is fallible--he made the pit of the avocado too big.

It’s a line that resonates in Europe these days. As the European Community marches toward greater unity, it draws complaints that it is obliterating a rich treasure of national diversity by regulating the color of condoms and the curvature of cucumbers.

In reality, however, things are never entirely black and white. Take, for example, the question of when an apple is REALLY and apple. Or whether the foam should count as part of the beer. . .

Among the 12 European Community nations, Denmark is a leader in complaining that Brussels is usurping power that should stay at the national level. At the last EC summit two months ago in Birmingham, England, Denmark’s pet peeve had to do with a little apple, grown exclusively in Denmark and Germany, called the Ingrid Marie.

Danish officials in Birmingham declared themselves to be outraged that until a few days before the summit, an EC regulation had forbidden the sale of the Ingrid Marie as an eating apple outside Denmark. What business did the commission have, they wanted to know, in dictating how big an apple must be before it qualifies as an eating apple?

Only when Denmark protested, said Danish Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, did the EC commission modify its regulation to permit cross-border sales of the little Ingrid Marie for purposes other than making apple juice and apple sauce. Celebrating Denmark’s triumph over the commission, Ellemann-Jensen said, “An apple a day keeps the commission at bay.”

Not so fast.

It turns out that the originator of the rule governing the size of an eating apple was an EC “management committee” made up of representatives of the agriculture ministries of the 12 EC nations, acting at the request of EC apple growers. More than that, the commission official who sets the agenda for the management committee is a Dane named Thor Haugstrup.

“People think we just take our rules down from the clear blue sky,” Haugstrup said. “But in fact we set standards only at the request of the member states.”

Haugstrup said EC members had good reason to set a minimum diameter--65 millimeters--for eating apples sold across EC borders.

“If you pick an apple before it’s big enough, it won’t ripen and have the proper flavor,” he said. “It’s a question of giving consumers at least a chance of buying a good apple.”

Until this year, the Ingrid Marie apple was bigger than the 65-millimeter minimum. But Thor Pedersen, Danish agriculture specialist, said Denmark’s particularly cool spring and hot summer stunted the growth of this year’s Ingrid Marie crop, and the average apple was only 60 millimeters in diameter.

So Denmark asked the EC management committee to change the standard. After overcoming objections from Germany, the committee in effect reduced the minimum size for an eating apple to 55 millimeters.

The Danes were pleased. At the end of his press conference after the Birmingham summit, Ellemann-Jensen distributed two boxes of Ingrid Marie apples to reporters, saying: “You can eat them in good conscience, because they’re legal now.”