A Critical Reflection on the Single Most Important Provision in All of EU Food Law

The most fundamental notion underlying ten years of reform of EU food safety law has been codified in Article 14(1) of Regulation (EC) 178/2002: food shall not be placed on the market if it is unsafe. This notion has been elaborated in most of the rest of EU food law, first and foremost in the other paragraphs of Article 14. This contribution analyses Article 14 and argues in favour of a text-conform interpretation.