Abstract
In this chapter I analyse the making of a European Regulation for health claims between 2003 and 2006, and how a juridical-political commitment to the regulation of information affects how food and bodies can or cannot enter politics. Food itself, as a composite entity, is excluded from the regulation of health claims, as these claims are regulated with respect to individual food components, ingredients, and nutrients. Food becomes information’s constitutive outside. Next, we look at information’s addressee: the consumer. The consumer is a remarkable kind of figure and a cornerstone of the liberal market economy. It is here that we discern something very peculiar about health claims: they assume situations of rational and informed choice while referring to the constitutive outside of those very situations: food as a biochemical complex on the one hand, and the body as a complex of often unpredictable metabolic processes on the other hand.
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Notes
- 1.
With the exception of Novel Foods as foods that are new to the EU market. These are under a different EU legislation which includes the characterization and safety of the food in question.
- 2.
Proposal 424 and reports from this ordinary legislative procedure (from the Commission, Parliament, the Council and the Economic and Social Committee) are available on the website of the Parliament’s Legislative Observatory. The code of this procedure file is 2003/0165 (COD). Weblink: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?id=23510. This enables one to track the development of the decisional procedure and the opinions, comments, and amendments of the relevant actors and institutions involved (last verified on December 22, 2022).
- 3.
ERNA is the European Responsible Nutrition Alliance, an international federation of food and food supplement industries.
- 4.
Interview, 14/03/14.
- 5.
Yet it turned up again in 2020, in a report evaluating the Claims Regulation (European Commission, 2020). The report stresses the need to establish nutrient profiles. In 2022, 15 years after the NHCR entered into force in 2007, EFSA released a first opinion on the criteria that could be taken into account when setting nutrient profiles (EFSA, 2022). It is an advisory document, the implementation of which is at the discretion of the European Commission.
- 6.
Barry (2013) theorizes information as an interplay between transparency and concealment. He analyses a series of knowledge controversies concerning the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. Barry documents how this construction became a political experiment in transparency about the pipeline in terms of information. Information, however, is never readily available to take, but it must be produced. Information, as Barry shows, becomes a stake in a political climate with transparency among its core values. Rather than simply bringing everything to light, practices and controversies related to transparency revolve around which information is valuable and which information is not. Barry takes the term constitutive outside from Judith Butler.
- 7.
- 8.
The figure of the consumer reflects this wavering between market and consumer protection, and legal scholars do not necessarily agree on how to interpret the evolution of legislation and case law that address the profile of consumers. While some say that a trend towards more protection and intervention is discernible, accompanied by the image of a more vulnerable consumer, others say that what is protected is not the (vulnerable) consumer as such, but the quality and quantity of information allowing consumers to make choices—with the aim of empowering consumers rather than paternalizing them. Either way, information is considered as objective and factual.
- 9.
Some forms of accreditation, through third parties, are themselves subject to market dynamics and competition. See Laurent and Mallard (2020).
- 10.
See: European Commission (2006), recital 8, p. 2.
- 11.
Personal Interview with the Director of a Brussels-based agency for consultancy on regulatory matters (March 2014).
- 12.
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Hendrickx, K. (2023). Liberal Food, Liberal Consumers. In: Health Without Bodies. Health, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4950-2_5
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