Crazier by the Dozen

Recently, a number of British media outlets have picked up on a rumour that the EU is set to ban selling eggs by the dozen:

• The Mail on Sunday: EU to ban selling eggs by the dozen
• The Daily Telegraph: EU to ban selling eggs by dozen
• BBC: UK scrambles to to keep 'dozen eggs' in EU battle

The story, as far as I can tell, broke in the trade magazine The Grocer (the original report is here). The general thrust of all these articles is that new EU food labelling legislation supposedly prevents retailers from selling eggs by number, and instead have to sell them by weight alone. The Mail on Sunday even claimed:

"Until now, Britain has been exempt from EU regulations that forbid the selling of goods by number."

This story even at first glance seems so ridiculous it is surprising it was picked up at all. Clearly, the European Union has never banned the selling of eggs by the number. Any visit across the Channel would have provided living proof of eggs being sold by the dozen across Europe. Moreover, the new legislation that has drawn the ire of the Righteous Forces of British Measures does not mean the end of any non-existent UK opt-out and it won't ban selling eggs by the dozen in the future.

The directive in question (which has not yet entered into force, but the proposed text can be read here), does not in fact deal with the quantity in which foods are sold but applies to information that should be displayed on food labelling. It specifically states that the objective of the regulation is that:

"It should be ensured that consumers are appropriately informed as regards food they consume."

In response to the media uproar, the European Parliament itself also issued a press release stating unequivocally that:

"Selling eggs by the dozen will not be illegal under the terms of the amendments adopted by the European Parliament to EU food labelling proposals.  Labels will still be able to indicate the number of food items in a pack, whether of eggs, bread rolls or fish fingers."

Faced with the sheer lunacy of what they were accusing the EU of, various media outlets quickly backtracked. The Daily Mail on July 6th published a piece by the editor of The Grocer, Adam Leyland, in which he claimed that

"We do not believe the European Parliament set out to ban such measurements. European legislation can be complex, vague, byzantine and open to different interpretation by different member states."

Firstly, that exposes the Mail's own headline the previous Sunday as a complete sham. Secondly, laws are always open to interpretation - that's why there is a judiciary; UK national legislation hardly reads like Harry Potter. Thirdly, the proposed regulation did not even purport to ban anything other than misleading food labels, and did not concern itself with the quantity in which food is sold. Lastly, it is clearly impossible to sell eggs other than by a fixed number without breaking their shells and siphoning off the egg white to make for clearly rounded quantities.

All the proposed regulation did was state that food packaging should display the net weight. It doesn't ban selling food stuffs by the number, nor displaying the number on the label. Legislation is open to interpretation but how any national government would have read into the directive that eggs cannot be sold by the number is beyond me. Since eggs are already weighed before being sold - and then sorted into a category based on their size - the whole thing really was a storm in a teacup.

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The topic was also covered by Tabloid Watch, EUTopia, Angry Mob and Liberal Conspiracy.

A quick Google search in French and Dutch seems to suggest mainstream media in at least some other parts of Europe either did not pick up on the story at all or did so in response to the Daily Mail's inane allegations.