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Have you fact-checked those claims? In my experience, these "stupid EU" stories are more often false than not.

The banana myth is a classic, and is untrue. There are standards for grading bananas, but no ban on selling bananas of the "wrong" curvature.

I couldn't find a source for the snail story, except a single, fairly sketchy article referencing Polish news stories. I'd take it with a grain of salt.

The carrot/fruit issue apparently comes from regulation concerning what jams, spreads etc. can be made of. The directive in question outlines a number of different foodstuffs you can make jams out of, including ginger and, of course, berries. Neither of these are fruits either. The directive does not claim they are.

I didn't look up the water claim. That one sounds fairly believable to me as medical claims are usually pretty heavily regulated, but I wouldn't care to bet on it being true, either.




RE: snails, here's the official document listing them as "fishery product": https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32...


"the products excluded from the definition of fishery products"

i.e. excluding any snails other than sea snails.




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