Throughout history popularly held truisms often get shattered, leaving us not only a new batch of eventually discredited truisms but also a suspicion that we shouldn’t believe these axioms to begins with.
For example, turn-of-the-century physicists determined that cars couldn’t travel faster than 45 mph because the human body couldn’t stand the stress. Karl Marx caught a lot of peoples’ attention for quite some time. Today, slowly eroding is the false idea that Europeans are so sophisticated and not just a pack of prize chumps. Then somehow we come to poor Max Weber.
German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) left democracy loving folks in a panic by his well thought out studies of the bureaucratic. Max pointed out that all forms of government would eventually succumb to the obvious efficiency of the bureaucracy. I’m starting to believe that the European Union is really an exercise in proving validity of a consumer driven marketplace and in concluding the final death knell for Weber.
Yes: it is true. The grand statesmen of the E.U. have passed an edict restricting the use of the word “Parmesan” for that style of cheese. However, Gouda and Edam were ruled to be generic terms. The great cheesemen and women of Cheddar, England had pinned their hopes on winning an E.U. appellation, but alas, their dreams ended on the rocks of generic despair. Why feta and parmesan warrant protection and national trademark and cheddar, gouda, etc., do not, is anyone’s guess. But, it’s obvious that the European body politic is allowing the bureaucrats way too much power in deciding what names shoppers should call their products.
It doesn’t stop there. The E.U. officials, apparently not having enough to do, have made rules on how much bend is in bananas allowed for sale. A mathematical formula is in place to protect honest produce shoppers from mistakenly buying bananas too straight or too curved. I was very close to getting the formula but at the last minute I decided that this was information I didn’t really want.
It will be interesting to see if bananas in U.S. grocery stores start coming in extreme shapes. I’m sure the properly shaped ones will go straight to Europe. The Central Americans aren’t dumb.
The Europeans have also accepted legislation on the exact color of strawberries, the thickness of packaged sliced meats, and the mind boggling standardization of matching baked goods shapes with certain names. When I called the E.U. delegation in D.C. for information, what irritated them most were my questions about pretzels.
Can you still buy pretzels sticks? Must pretzels be “pretzel” shaped? What would you call a baked circular thing that tastes and looks like a pretzels? While the E.U. folks thought banana legislation to be of the utmost importance, they found my line of quizzing a waste of time.
We in the U.S. are in fact not immune. The F.D.A. has strict guide lines in place over the size of peaches. Diminutive peaches must be tossed and not even canned or juiced. In fact one large California producer asked for permission to give the good yet small stuff to homeless shelters and the like. He received a very stern warning from the American fruit police. So instead of helping the hungry, he has a great compost pile. This is obscene.
When we see this bureaucratic nonsense in our country we must stamp it out immediately. Otherwise we’ll end up like the Europeans —another pack of weenies.