Is half the food you eat illegal in Europe?

By William Entriken

3 minutes

I randomly picked up several food products off the shelf in Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s to see if those foods would be banned in Europe. This is way harder than you might think, and you wont believe the results.

Why check?

My research is inspired by Dr. Daniel Pompa’s video in Costco where he claims every food product in the candy aisle is illegal in Europe.

I’ve heard the claim “half of the foods in the US are illegal in Europe” recently on the Tucker Carlson podcast, and many years ago from Bernie Sanders. But did not hear them cite specific evidence.

Here is some evidence.

Methodology

My wife and I randomly picked up 5–10 products at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. We took photos of the UPC code and then I went home to research.

First, many of these products would be banned specifically for labeling requirements. In the US you can say the ingredients include some emulsifier. But in EU you must include the E-ingredient number like E-164. I don’t consider this a worthwhile distinction and it has no effect on your health (unless you are specifically allergic to that thing, which you aren’t because allergens are a separate labeling requirement).

This required more leg work than you might imagine. There is no EU database of allowed or disallowed food ingredients so you actually need to read laws and cross reference their scientific publications, which are cited from the laws.

OpenRouter has a mode where you can talk to multiple language models at once. You can also access these models on their own platforms.

I also researched these by asking various language models: OpenAI o1, OpenAI o3-mini, Grok 2, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini Pro 1.5, Grok 2(1212), DeepSeek R3. They disagreed on the results. Even different models from the same company. This is sensitive to the knowledge cutoff date of the model and how creative they are versus citing hard facts.

Results

So we found one product that is illegal in (part of) Europe. And I think another one probably illegal, but I’m questioning myself because nobody else seems to have gotten to that conclusion yet. Both of them are from Whole Foods.

Conclusion

I was surprised that Whole Foods (in the US) would have any foods that are illegal in Europe (ignoring labeling requirements).

Looking up the legality of foods is very difficult. Europe has a centralized additives database, a novel foods database and all the laws and regulations published. But cross referencing is non-existent.

For example, looking up UV treated wine:

According to the information available to Member States’ competent authorities, this product was not consumed in the EU to a significant degree as a food before 15 May 1997. Therefore, a pre-market authorisation in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2015/2283 is required before it can be placed as food on the EU market.

But it does not tell you whether any pre-market authorizations have been granted. And that leaves out the rule exceptions for certain food categories and regional exceptions.

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