Great Moments in Government Waste, the European Version

It's aggravating and maddening to send tax dollars to Washington and watch them get wasted on pork-barrel projects and inefficient programs. Imagine how much worse it would be, though, to send tax dollars to an international bureaucracy and be utterly helpless to stop the worst kinds of boondoggle spending. That's how taxpayers from European nations must feel when they discover, as the Daily Mail reveals, that the European Commission bureaucrats squandered close to $20 million to conclude that fruit is a healthy food and to create a "Mr. Fruitness" superhero character.

EU bureaucrats have squandered millions of pounds on a study which reached the unsurprising conclusion that fruit is good for you. An astonishing 13.8million euros - some £11.7million - has been spent on research involving 200 scientists which found that 'two apples a day keep cholesterol at bay'. Much of the money went on developing and promoting a green-skinned EU superhero called Mr Fruitness designed to persuade children to eat more fruit. ...The multi-million pound project called IsaFruit lasted four years. ...The website set up to publicise Mr Fruitness...describes him as 'a superhero with special powers that come from the nutritional substances in fruit - vitamins and others; key components of an intelligent and conscious diet'.