Conclusion

While revisiting the nNFR, something beyond the provisions emerged. As aforementioned, the NFR was ill fated since the very beginning. In the origi­nal text proposed in 1992, the European Parliament’s focus for this regulation was not mainly about people’s safety but to attempt to provide and strengthen the legality of the EU’s governance.

Technically, the nNFR had indeed made efforts to reduce trade conflicts between the EU and its international trading partners to satisfy practical needs, such as the unique application procedure for the third world’s “traditional food,” while, viewed in terms of legal implicitness, through unified and centralized, but complicated, administrative procedures, the EU has indeed externally con­tributed to its sovereignty by re-iterating the right to define “novelty” while internally moving in the direction of common governance, that is, a common food policy.^[604] But the dilemma haunting the nNFR is still growing.

On the one hand, for a long time, continuing disputes about the “demo­cratic deficit”^[605] related to the EU’s governance and legislative procedures have not subsided. The nNFR, like other regulations, has indeed brought criticisms from within. How and to what extent to care for people’s psychological com­fort given different preferences due to geographical locality under the unified and centralized nNFR seems to be an almost irresolvable problem. Moreover, the practice of arbitrarily defining the novel status of food with boundaries and time to consolidate the EU’s governance is continuing to face challenges from third-world trading partners and create unnecessary trade obstacles, though lots of effort has been made already. Perhaps the nNFR will reduce the barriers of international trade, and we can hold optimistic expectations about that.

Revisiting Novel Food Regulation 161 the acceptance and circulation of exotic and novel foods still have a pessimistic future, but so do the psychological and moral feelings of the EU people.

From a practical view, with the implementation of generalized authoriza­tion, foods defined as novel will eventually be removed from the pending list one by one as time goes by. Does this mean that in the future, the function of the nNFR will be eventually replaced by other deliberated regulations, like the one for GMOs, that is, GMF, and left to no practical purpose anymore? This needs further observation.

But one thing for sure is that, with the establishment of the legal basis for the centralization of EU governance, the functions of the nNFR seem to go back to the very basics—that is, an extremely elementary design destined just for commercial operations. In other words, for the special multi-level governance of the EU, the function of the nNFR is limited to the minimum demand of politics “in the name of safety” or at the service of international trade. As for the psychological satisfaction of the public, both inside and outside the EU, it still dwells in a twilight zone where the sun is yet to shine.

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