I’m joking, of course. It’s hard to keep a straight face about something like this. But on the other hand, the issue is more important than it might seem at first glance.

What am I talking about?

The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 14 June 2017, Case C-422/16:

“Purely plant-based products may not, in principle, be marketed under names such as ‘milk’, ‘cream’, ‘butter’, ‘cheese’ or ‘yoghurt’, which EU law reserves for products of animal origin. This also applies where such names are supplemented by clarifications or descriptions indicating the plant-based origin of the product.”

So what exactly should I call my creation?

INGREDIENTS

• 1.5 litres of soy milk (or more)
• Yogurt starter culture (according to the instructions on the package)
• 1 tablespoon of sugar (if using unsweetened soy milk)
• Juice of one lemon

METHOD

Bring the soy milk to a boil—carefully, because soy milk foams up even more enthusiastically than cow’s milk. Let it cool down.

Add the yogurt culture. If the milk is unsweetened, add a tablespoon of sugar and stir.

Pour the milk into a yogurt maker (see notes) and leave it running for at least eight hours, until you get the consistency of a strongly fermented yogurt.

Transfer the finished yogurt to a pot, add the lemon juice, and heat gently over very low heat for 20–30 minutes, without exceeding 70°C (158°F). Do not let it boil!

After a while, a clearly visible curd will form. Carefully pour everything onto a cloth-lined sieve and leave it to drain. Once most of the liquid is gone, wrap the curd in the cloth and squeeze firmly.

VARIATIONS

You can also use lime juice, citric acid, or even mild vinegar to curdle the protein. The important thing is the acidic environment.

You can make this forbidden dairy alternative from any plant milk with a reasonably high protein content. In Germany, for example, pea milk is available (I’ve already made yogurt from it), as well as lupin milk, which I still need to try.

NOTES

You’ll need a yogurt maker.

You can also make the yogurt in many bread machines using the fermentation programme or in multicookers that have a dedicated yogurt setting. The key is maintaining a temperature of 40°C (104°F) for an extended period, allowing the bacteria to do their work.

The finished cheese is a bit drier than traditional Polish cottage cheese, probably because soy milk contains far less fat. Next time I want to add some fat—perhaps avocado oil. The challenge will be creating a stable emulsion so that the oil mixes properly with the plant milk.

SERVING

Serve it exactly as you would traditional cottage cheese: with radishes, chives, tomatoes, or yogurt. Use it as a filling for pancakes or savoury crêpes. It also works beautifully fried with onions and served with pasta.

Back in 2017, the CJEU ruled that terms such as soy cheese, plant milk, or soy cottage cheese were illegal within the European Union.

An even more absurd proposal followed: Amendment 171, debated in the European Parliament. It would not only have banned dairy-related names but also packaging resembling traditional dairy cartons, visual representations evoking cheese wheels or milk splashes, descriptive phrases such as “buttery” or “plant-based alternative to yogurt,” and perhaps most ridiculously of all, even claims about the lower carbon footprint of plant-based products compared with animal ones.

Fortunately, that nonsense, heavily backed by dairy lobbyists, was rejected. The same happened to Amendment 165, which would have prohibited terms such as plant-based burger, vegan sausage, and probably even the plant-based blood sausage I tried in Poland recently—which, to be fair, was surprisingly decent.

But the issue goes much deeper than simply mocking bureaucrats or criticising agricultural lobbies.

Ironically, these amendments reveal a split within the meat and dairy industries themselves. Some companies are desperately trying to stop the plant-based trend, while others are enthusiastically embracing it.

One common argument against terms like soy milk, vegan cheese, or plant-based burgers is that these products have always been animal-based and that such names never existed historically.

That is simply wrong.

Centuries ago, people already made almond milk, almond cheese, and fig sausages.

And in more recent history, Polish vegetarian cookbooks offer countless examples. Kosowska’s Vegetarian Cookbook from 1929 contains recipes for Viennese cutlets made from oats. In One Hundred Lenten and Vegetarian Dishes, by the immensely popular interwar author Pani Elżbieta (Elżbieta Kiewnarska), we find cutlets made from beans, peas, root vegetables, carrots, spinach, fennel, buckwheat, potatoes, rice, lentil loaves, and even bean cheese.

The more fundamental question is this:

What actually makes a burger a burger? Or cottage cheese, cottage cheese?

Is it the ingredients alone? Or does the product’s function on the plate and the method by which it is made matter as well?

I made my soy cottage cheese using exactly the same process as traditional cottage cheese. Its essential component is also the same: coagulated protein.

Yes, I quite like the playful alternative name sorozhek that I once encountered somewhere. But honestly, there is no good reason why a product made from plant protein should be denied the name cottage cheese simply because the protein comes from soybeans instead of cows.

And beyond all that—last but not least—this kind of evolution happens in cooking all the time.

It is one of the fundamental reasons why culinary culture develops.

Recipes change over centuries. Today’s Polish bigos bears little resemblance to its original form, which consisted almost entirely of meat with perhaps some apples and onions. Frankfurters were originally made only from pork. Chicken ham is a modern invention. By definition, ham meant pork. A hamburger was beef and beef alone.

There is absolutely no reason to erect absurd bureaucratic barriers against culinary creativity or to preserve recipes as if they were sacred standards locked away in Sèvres.

The beauty of cooking lies precisely in constant change, experimentation, and improvement.

Without that, cuisine becomes a museum.

And while spending a day or two in a living-history village, playing “How Our Ancestors Lived,” can be tremendous fun, nobody would actually want to spend their entire life there.

Even the increasingly popular movement of culinary reconstruction in Poland isn’t about reproducing old dishes exactly as they once were. We cook on different stoves, with different ingredients, under completely different circumstances. Reconstruction is really about creating something new: interpretations and arrangements inspired by historical flavours.

Plant-based cooking is particularly fascinating in this regard. By its very nature, it deconstructs traditional meat dishes, recreating familiar flavours from entirely different ingredients.

And then it goes one step further, transcending the original and using it merely as a point of departure for new explorations of taste and texture.

Any attempt to limit that imagination and creativity is a crime greater than extinguishing a star.

How do I know? I do my homework — no smoke and mirrors. Here are the receipts.

The EU Breakfast Directive, which came into force on June 14, now requires precise labeling of honey blends, including the percentage share and country of origin of every honey used in the product.

The authoritarian European Union is also forcing us to eat… better jam.

From June 14 onward, jams must contain at least 45 grams of fruit per 100 grams of product. Previously, the minimum requirement was 35%.

Products manufactured and labeled before June 14 can still be sold until stocks run out or the products expire. In practice, that could mean until the middle of 2029.

This may actually be good news for jam lovers—many producers and wholesalers may want to clear out their higher-sugar jams as quickly as possible and offer substantial discounts.

But this absolutely broke my patriotic heart.

Because, as I wrote, I checked the jam I buy for my guests.

Then I looked online and, hell, I’ll even name the brands: Łowicz and bloody Herbapol—one of the most iconic brands in Polish history!

Those branded Polish jams contain 35% fruit—the absolute legal minimum that was allowed until June 14. The very least they could get away with.

And although I assume my readers are intelligent people, if anyone missed the irony: I’m genuinely happy that the European Union is imposing stricter standards on food producers.

What annoyed me was the comparison.

Because not only the organic mid-range jam I buy for breakfast guests, but even GUT&GÜNSTIG, Edeka’s cheapest store brand, contains 50% fruit!

Cheap German supermarket jam is of higher quality than premium Polish branded jam.

Not everyone is expected to know this, so let me explain: Poland is one of Europe’s fruit-producing powerhouses, alongside Italy and Spain. Spain’s position is boosted by its dominance in citrus production.

Germany, judging by the fields around me, mainly grows potatoes and rapeseed while importing huge quantities of fruit—much of it from Poland.

And yet they produce better, cheaper jams than we do.

Something here is clearly wrong, and I think the problem is on the Polish side.

What do you think?

This isn’t merely a difference between jams or even between economies. It’s a difference between states.

Producing the lowest-quality food products imaginable is, in many ways, the essence of post-1989 Poland.

It also says a lot about how markets in different countries will react.

If even the cheapest German jams already contain 50% fruit, nothing will really change there. But if branded Polish jams only contain 35%, prices will inevitably rise.

Manufacturers may also try to offset higher fruit costs through downsizing.

I wrote about this recently, particularly about the great success of an organization from Hamburg (of course—the best city in the world).

They may also reduce ingredient quality: more water, more gelling agents, more high-fructose corn syrup—which, personally, I dream of seeing banned across the EU.

Interestingly, the directive also introduces a new category: reduced-sugar fruit juices.

This is a classic example of public health and nutrition policy.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about it, because fruit juices aren’t the main problem. Sugary soft drinks, candy bars, and other junk food are.

A total EU-wide ban on junk-food advertising or a continent-wide sugar tax would probably achieve much better results.

Although when discussing sugar taxes, we should remember the EU paradox.

The European Union still subsidizes sugar beet production—meaning more sugar, and cheaper sugar. That makes sugar more abundant in processed foods, while governments simultaneously impose sugar taxes to cover the enormous and growing healthcare costs associated with excessive consumption.

But the fundamental issue here goes far beyond the quality of our jam or the price of sugary drinks.

It concerns our collective survival and quality of life as societies.

The increasing strain on healthcare systems is becoming one of the greatest challenges facing Western countries, largely because of aging populations.

Unless we improve overall public health, no amount of funding or private payments will save healthcare systems.

We need more hospitals, clinics, scanners, and beds—but also more doctors, nurses, and caregivers.

Future generations simply will not be able to provide enough healthcare workers, regardless of salaries.

Not everyone can—or should—become a doctor or an elderly-care worker. I say that from my own experience of working in care homes for two years.

The recommended daily intake of sugar should not exceed 25 grams, and generally, less is better. Fifty grams is considered the absolute upper limit.

Americans consume over 100 grams per day. Europeans consume between 60 and 120 grams.

Do you know what that means?

It means that as we grow older, more and more people around us develop insulin resistance, diabetes, obesity, and all the diseases associated with obesity.

When I weighed almost 15 kilograms more than I do now, my work was far more exhausting, and I was much less productive. That represents another category of social costs caused by excessive sugar consumption.

Just as alcohol-related cases fill emergency rooms on weekends, the victims of sugar and highly processed food place pressure on healthcare systems 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The only way to save healthcare systems in developed countries is through social engineering—creating, encouraging, and sometimes even forcing large-scale lifestyle changes, particularly changes in eating habits.

That requires both interventionist measures and long-term health strategies that transcend political divisions.

I greatly admire British policy in this area—what Starmer’s government has done, building on initiatives originally introduced by the Conservatives.

It makes perfect sense.

If conservatism means caring about families and children, then policies such as sugar taxes should be among its core principles.

A preschooler’s diet should be tasty and healthy.

And everyone should be beautiful, rich, and healthy.

The difference is that the issue of diet has strong scientific backing.

A new study published in *Nutrients*, an international peer-reviewed open-access journal focused on human nutrition, has found a connection between children’s mental development and their diet.

The study, conducted by Norwegian researchers, aimed to identify links between personality traits and symptoms of depression and anxiety measured at age eight, and diet during the prenatal period and throughout childhood up to the age of eight.

The researchers used data from one of the world’s largest cohort studies, covering 41% of all pregnancies in Norway between 1999 and 2008. The project collected an enormous amount of data from 114,500 children, 95,200 mothers, and 75,200 fathers.

Every year, this database produces new discoveries and research findings.

And this is the answer to those who complain that dietary recommendations are always changing and that scientists keep changing their minds about what’s healthy and what isn’t.

Because the last few years have indeed brought an explosion of new discoveries in nutrition science.

This is largely thanks to new technologies and big data. Without them, analyzing datasets of this magnitude would simply be impossible.

By the way, it makes the researchers behind the American Nurses’ Health Study even more impressive. They had to process data from more than 200,000 nurses manually—letter by letter—when participants still mailed in paper questionnaires.

Today, data from that study and many others are being analyzed using artificial intelligence.

This is the moment when nutrition science is finally becoming fully evidence-based practice.

It’s worth remembering that evidence-based medicine is actually quite new.

EBM became standard practice in medicine only about thirty years ago, and in nutrition science roughly ten years later.

Evidence-based medicine means using the best available scientific evidence in clinical practice—not simply accepting something because a famous professor says so.

Two years ago, almost in the center of Hamburg, in a tunnel leading to Münzviertel, I nearly walked into two guys preparing a heroin injection.

A spoon. A lighter. A syringe.

Two of my close friends died from heroin addiction in the 1990s.

Now imagine you’re walking into a pharmacy.

You need a syringe for a medical injection. Or maybe for drawing blood for some magical potion.

And on the way you come across the syringe those guys left behind.

You wouldn’t stop, pick it up, and inject yourself with it.

Right?

Unless you’re already addicted enough that it no longer matters.

If you understand why that syringe is dangerous, you may feel the same unpleasant shiver I do whenever I see something like that.

Then you continue to the pharmacy.

In the mid-19th century, as many as one in four women giving birth in hospitals died.

Then one of humanity’s greatest forgotten heroes appeared: Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis.

The pioneer of evidence-based medicine discovered through observation and research that the key was… washing hands.

We cannot see bacteria or viruses.

The fact that you’re alive and reading this today owes a great deal to Semmelweis and the evidence-based approach he helped establish.

Thanks to it, women stopped dying in childbirth in such numbers.

And thanks to it, you know that using a dirty syringe left by drug users is a terrible idea.

Evidence-based medicine relies on a hierarchy of scientific evidence.

Even without studying research methodology in detail, common sense tells us that a Norwegian study involving more than one hundred thousand children carries different weight than a study of twenty people conducted over two months.

A fictional example—but you’ve certainly seen something similar.

Popular media outlets love finding a tiny study that nobody has replicated and presenting it as a revolutionary breakthrough.

Even more so do various self-proclaimed “critical thinkers” who claim to have “woken up.”

What they really need is a lesson in research methodology.

Because methodology is what allows scientists to analyze datasets as large as the Norwegian study.

So what does this research tell us about preschoolers’ diets?

Surprisingly simple things.

More fruits and vegetables: good.

More salty and sugary snacks: bad.

Children who ate fruits and vegetables more frequently showed fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, and emotional problems.

Children who consumed more salty and sugary snacks showed more.

The authors acknowledge limitations, including an overrepresentation of highly educated families. They also note the possibility of reverse causation: children already experiencing mental health problems may eat more emotionally, consuming more sugar and fat and fewer fruits and vegetables.

Although the study found a clear association between healthy, varied diets rich in fruits and vegetables and better mental health outcomes, the researchers stress that further research is needed.

They also emphasize the importance of this issue from a public-health perspective.

The study concludes:

“Current adherence to dietary guidelines is low. Therefore, identifying ways to support young populations through structures and systems that influence children, such as early childhood education and primary healthcare services, as well as supporting parents in providing healthy diets, should be a public-health priority.”

The researchers further note:

“Mental health problems are costly both for individuals and society. Ensuring a healthy and varied diet early in life may support children’s mental health and provide substantial societal benefits. Methods to improve dietary habits in early childhood should therefore be identified through targeted intervention studies.”

And this is where politics enters the picture.

The implications for public-health policy are obvious.

They align closely with recent initiatives in the United Kingdom.

Importantly, there is broad political consensus on the issue. Efforts to restrict advertising of unhealthy foods began under the previous Conservative government.

One of the leading candidates to succeed Prime Minister Starmer is former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who has strongly emphasized this direction of reform.

Whenever we discuss public health, it quickly becomes clear that private choices—such as what small children eat—become political issues when multiplied across an entire population.

This leads to policies such as restrictions on junk-food advertising.

And such decisions almost always run against the interests of some business lobby.

The tobacco lobby.

The alcohol lobby.

The junk-food lobby.

You can usually tell that a policy is moving in the right direction by the amount of noise and outrage it provokes from lobbyists and their sponsors.

Can you hear the howling?

Excellent.

Because although prices have already fallen on global markets, they fell from the record level of 4.40 USD per pound, due to forecasts of record coffee harvests in Brazil, which accounts for one-third of global coffee production.

But the exchange price and the retail shelf price are two completely different things.

Commodity market prices often concern future purchases of future harvests.

And this is the price for coffee that will be harvested up to September—meaning it will reach the market at the end of the year.

But that still doesn’t mean store prices will fall.

Coffee harvested in August will reach store shelves at the earliest in early 2027. From a price drop on the world exchange to lower prices in stores takes almost a year—effectively about a year and a half from now.

And it may even arrive only toward the end of 2027.

In the meantime, further disruptions may occur due to aggression against Iraq.

Because one-third of the world’s coffee harvests from India, Southeast Asia, and East Africa pass near the Strait of Hormuz.

Fuel costs are also rising, which affects even Brazilian coffee—because transporting products to customers becomes far more expensive.

And so do cultivation costs, including fertilizers, whose production depends heavily on natural gas.

So will record coffee harvests make your small black coffee cheaper?

There’s a chance—provided peace comes quickly to the Middle East.

Another issue is a practice we all know very well: when raw material prices rise, everyone raises their prices. Which makes sense.

But when raw material prices fall, somehow it’s much rarer for anyone to lower their prices.

So a drop in coffee prices on the exchange doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll pay less for your espresso.

And if you do—probably not for another year.

The UK consumer confidence index dropped from -1 in January to -13 (sic!), while 9 out of 10 consumers are worried about the cost of living. 8 out of 10 want to reduce spending in the near future. 40% of respondents want to buy less, and 27% plan to eat out less often or choose cheaper places. Eating and drinking out is always one of the very first things people cut back on during a crisis.

For many restaurants, combined with rising food and energy prices, this will be deadly.

The places most at risk are mid-range venues. The most expensive restaurants, where the truly wealthy eat, won’t lose customers.

As history teaches us, crises like this make the rich even richer, meaning they can afford even more expensive restaurants.

Customers from higher segments will move toward the cheapest places, fast food chains, and similar options. In general, everything between fast casual and lower-end fine dining will lose out.

The cheapest and the most expensive segments of gastronomy will benefit. Or rather — they will lose less than others, because some customers will give up eating out altogether.

The question is: what will replace restaurant dining?

Because if someone eats out regularly, they usually don’t have the time and/or the skills to cook for themselves.

And this is where the first major winner appears:

1. Convenience food

Ever since Andy Warhol painted Campbell’s soup cans, they’ve been a symbol of modern cuisine — and modern culture itself.

I’m full of admiration for those unknown heroes from dark industrial kitchens developing recipes for Campbell’s soups and Kotliński sausages. Their work powered the transformations of the 20th century. Convenience food and the automatic washing machine were just as important for women’s liberation and equality as feminism and voting rights.

And this may be not only a threat, but also an opportunity for restaurants. A great example is Ed Red, which during the pandemic lockdown switched to producing artisan canned convenience meals — and became a nationwide success.

As a chef, I’d gladly help create products like that.

And as a customer, I happily buy ready-made flour-based products: dumplings, noodles, little pasta dishes. Ready-made Schupfnudeln or Spätzle are permanently on my shopping list. I don’t feel like making that kind of thing for myself, even though, like everyone else, I enjoy eating them. They also have an advantage over potatoes or rice: they’re ready in minutes.

And time will be crucial for people giving up restaurant lunches where meals arrive ready to eat in 5–30 minutes.

So the future belongs to simple, quick, easy-to-prepare meals and semi-prepared products such as:

• ready-made sauces in jars where you only add tofu/protein/a piece of corpse and maybe boil some pasta;
• prepared dumplings and noodles like the ones mentioned above.

This could also become an interesting opportunity for retailers — for example by offering complete ingredient sets for specific meals or weekly menus — and for producers including simple recipes with just a few ingredients directly on packaging.

This is a bit like the “lipstick effect”:
“I can’t afford dinner at a good restaurant anymore, but I can afford their semi-prepared products.”

So instead of buying some random pasta sauce, you buy an original RudeKitchen pasta sauce with my instructions on how to prepare and serve it.

2. Meal boxes with ingredients and recipe plans

I noticed this in Germany several years ago already. I don’t know how big the market is, but this segment may gain some of the customers giving up restaurants.

Because they don’t have to shop themselves — and if someone used to eat out every day, walking into a grocery store feels like Lemmy Kilmister in a kindergarten: “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” Or like GG Allin on Epstein Island.

And naturally this is also a field for chefs designing those menus. There’s also space for farmers — or rather agricultural cooperatives — because a single farmer probably couldn’t provide all the products needed for a full weekly menu. I myself have an idea for creating a PDF with recipes for a complete 7-day menu.

But I have absolutely no idea for sweet breakfasts. I’ve never eaten sweet breakfasts! And when I search online, it’s all pancakes and sweet fritters.

Seriously — do people actually make pancakes every morning?

That’s a nightmare. Messing around with batter, then washing a mountain of dishes afterward. Who has time for that in the morning? Maybe only the mythical 1950s American housewife.

Notice that supermarket chains already do something similar by publishing recipes using products from their own stores. Which leads us to the next point.

3. Kitchen know-how

It’s worth remembering the pandemic period, when online cooking courses exploded in popularity. Jamie Oliver showed people how to cook simple, tasty meals at home with just a few ingredients. Simple recipes and “15-minute meals” will attract the biggest audiences.

Not overcomplicated dishes for culinary lunatics using 30 ingredients and three hours of preparation.

I have a “15-minute meals” section myself where I’ll publish simple recipes for quick meals requiring no special skills or experience. There are already a few there.

AI has definitely changed the rules of the game, and many people will rely on AI for deciding what and how to cook.

This connects strongly with lifestyle medicine, where diet is one of the foundations. The coming shift in eating habits is an excellent opportunity to promote healthy nutrition through cheap, simple, tasty, balanced meals. I’m absolutely sure that guests who used to come to my place for plant-based falafel, burritos, or healthy vegetable soups won’t recreate those dishes at home.

First, because they don’t know how. And burritos or falafel actually require a lot of preparation and ingredients, so they’re not realistic daily home meals.

But people can throw a sausage into a frying pan with onions and eat it. The challenge is offering them something instead of that sausage.

4. Every possible channel for cheap food distribution

Things like online discount stores such as Motatos (which unfortunately just withdrew from Germany) or apps like Too Good To Go. Consumers will become even more price-driven.

Which is bad news for everyone, like me, who stands on the bright side of the Force and wants people to eat healthy, mostly plant-based, nutritious food. Because from a certain point onward, cheaper food inevitably means worse quality — nutritionally included.

Maybe what Zohran Mamdani recently did marks the beginning of a shift in this vicious cycle of unhealthy eating. The mayor of New York recently opened the first “Public Grocery Stores” — cheap municipal grocery stores in poor neighborhoods. Anyone who regularly reads my work knows I’m a huge supporter of this kind of food distribution.

The right to food is the most fundamental human right. Because if you don’t have food, no other rights matter — you simply die.

This point also includes something that makes evil people like me — who don’t want capitalism flourishing endlessly and GDP growing forever — very happy. Internal redistribution.

Or in normal language: not wasting food. Turning what we recently would have thrown away into another meal, because now we have to save money. Every chef who isn’t a complete idiot constantly thinks about reducing waste. Because, quoting a classic: “Throwing away food is a fucking sin.” And from a business perspective, it’s throwing away money. Incidentally, this also requires a certain kind of know-how.

5. Delivery — cheap food brought to your door

This is generally the lowest sector of gastronomy: cheap chains delivering food for next to nothing.

Customers from higher segments will definitely move into this sector. Although naturally some people who previously ordered delivery will now shift toward cooking at home or buying convenience meals. This industry, dominated entirely by giant digital platform companies, is one of the biggest winners of the pandemic and the 2020s.

And also a place of enormous exploitation, labor law violations, and illegal employment. Fortunately, its future remains uncertain. In the current system, most of the risk is pushed onto workers and couriers, who never know in the morning how much they’ll actually work or earn that day. But this model is necessary to keep delivery cheap.

Couriers earn very little and increasingly have had enough. Across the world — from India through Georgia, across Europe, the UK, the USA, and South America — union movements and strikes among delivery workers are growing stronger. I’ve written about them several times with admiration and respect. And this may become the factor that blows the entire industry apart. Especially in the European Union, where the Platform Work Directive was recently passed.

I do not doubt that the friends of big business will do everything possible in individual countries to delay its implementation and weaken it as much as possible. But any limitation on exploitation will increase delivery costs.

People cannot and will not stop eating. Only their eating and shopping habits will change. The coming trend could be described as a new folk cuisine, where accessibility — especially affordability — of ingredients becomes the key factor.

The ruling concerns a lawsuit filed last year by the consumer association Verbraucherzentrale Hamburg e.V. over the company reducing the size of Milka chocolate bars from 100 g to 90 g without clearly informing consumers. Milka Alpine Milk received the title of “deceptive packaging of the year 2025” from Hamburg consumers. At the same time the weight dropped from 100 g to 90 g, the price went from €1.49 to €1.99.

The judges ruled that information about reducing the product’s weight must remain on the packaging for at least four months after the change is introduced. The exact wording was left to the company. The ruling is not yet final—the company has already announced an appeal.

Let’s be honest. These practices are widespread and have existed for years under the name —downsizing—slightly and barely noticeably reducing package sizes, or often just the amount of product inside.

It’s a way of deceiving customers and sneaking through price increases people barely notice. Today the phenomenon is more often called shrinkflation, and under that name it has finally started getting wider attention. Also, since COVID, businesses using inflation and market disruptions as excuses for raising prices became so common and so painful for consumers that people finally started talking about it. FINALLY!

The Hamburg consumer organization has been highlighting the issue for quite a while in different ways.

It filed the lawsuit against Mondelez International at the end of August last year in the regional court in Bremen, where the German branch of the company is registered.

The lawsuit concerned “misleading packaging.” In the exact same package, the corporation was selling chocolate that was 1 millimeter thinner.

And come the fuck on—nobody goes grocery shopping with a caliper.

Armin Valet from the Hamburg organization said at the time:

“Many consumers have been buying Milka chocolate for years in familiar packaging and assume the amount of chocolate inside hasn’t changed. But they are being misled, because many varieties now contain only 90 grams, while the price remains the same or is even higher.”

The organization monitors the phenomenon and publishes results on a dedicated page that already contains more than 1,000 misleadingly packaged products:

Misleading Packaging List (Mogelpackungsliste)

Consumers can also report misleading packaging there themselves.

And by the way, as usual, the Germans already have a perfect word for it: Mogelpackung — “deceptive packaging.”

A related phenomenon becoming increasingly common is skimming — lowering product quality itself, for example by reducing the cocoa content in chocolate.

To be fair, producers and retailers really are struggling with the highest cocoa price increases in history over recent years. They are under pressure from rising production costs—energy prices are going through the roof too—while at the same time consumers are cutting spending harder and harder.

From a business perspective, deception becomes the most rational solution.

If “the sole purpose of business is profit maximization,” and on a broader level endless accumulation and concentration of capital, then from the perspective of a corporation any action serving that goal becomes not only acceptable but desirable.

The profits of increasingly mythical “shareholders” and “investors” become the only law and morality.

No crime is considered unacceptable if it brings more profit than losses. It only becomes “bad” when the costs get too high — for example, court penalties.

The history of the food industry is basically the history of fighting against how greed poisons all of us — often quite literally.

If we look back into history, we find the Adulteration of Food or Drink Act, the British food adulteration law from 1860. It was introduced after the uproar caused by the work of Thomas Wakley and Arthur Hill Hassall. Wakley was not only a surgeon and founder of The Lancet, but also a member of parliament raising the issue of food adulteration publicly.

At the time, common practices in the United Kingdom included:

• Bread whitened with toxic alum, with gypsum and chalk added to it.
• Milk diluted with water and thickened with flour.
• Toxic copper salts, arsenic, and chromium used to preserve and intensify colors.
• Tea mixed with leaves from other plants, and — as mentioned during parliamentary debates — even silkworm excrement.
• Coffee massively adulterated with chicory and even dark sugar.

To quote a classic, “That’s how the free market works.”

Inevitably, not only does bad money drive out good money—worse products replace better ones too.

And reducing the weight of a chocolate bar may seem trivial compared to adding gypsum to bread, but it’s the foot in the door.

If we don’t chop that foot off by slamming the door shut, we’re on the road back to exactly those kinds of practices.

Which is why it’s good there are still judges in Bremen who don’t kneel before the modern monarch—big capital.

If so, that’s a bit of a problem.

Arabica, which makes up nearly three-quarters of global coffee production, is less bitter and contains less caffeine, but it’s far more valued for its flavor.

The cheaper Robusta, with its less pleasant earthy and woody notes, is much easier and cheaper to produce.

And in the current situation — climate change, unstable weather, and increasingly extreme conditions — Arabica, which is far more demanding and sensitive to anomalies, is well on its way to becoming an exclusive luxury product.

The market will instead be dominated by the easier-to-grow and more resilient Robusta.

That’s the direction Nestlé — the world’s largest food corporation — is heading. The company has introduced new Robusta varieties resistant to climate anomalies and diseases, capable of producing much higher yields under climate stress than current crops. According to company representatives, the new varieties have been stripped of the unpleasant bitterness and woody taste.

Maybe in a few years, most consumers won’t even notice. The packaging will stay the same — only instead of “100% Arabica,” it’ll say something like “100% super-magical ultra-premium Robusta bullshit.”

And if you’re unlucky enough to be among the few people for whom this actually matters, you’ll wander around the store like Lemmy Kilmister in a kindergarten, desperately searching for even one little line of real Arabica.

And if you do find it and then see the price… most of us will just shrug and say: “Honestly, that Robusta isn’t that bad.”

There will be less and less Arabica grown. It’ll become more expensive, and fewer and fewer people will be able to afford it.

In the worst-case scenarios, Arabica becomes a tiny niche in global production — a delicacy for a handful of rich people and coffee obsessives.

And there’s an even worse scenario.

It ends up like many old apple varieties: Arabica disappears from the market entirely.

The only place you’ll still drink it will be in countries where it’s grown — mostly in South America — from some local guy who owns a tiny roastery and a small patch of land where his family has been growing coffee for thirteen generations.

That’s how the free market works.

Products like sprouts and microgreens — so often treated as part of a healthy fitness diet, eaten raw, added as garnish, to salads and slaws — are actually among the biggest microbiological hazards in the kitchen. Especially in the modern kitchen.

Washing is not effective. It does not remove salmonella from contaminated food.

What’s worse, washing may spread the bacteria around with splashing water.

And let’s remember: the kitchen is a dream environment for bacteria. Warm, humid, and full of food.

Why is this especially dangerous in the modern kitchen?

Because nowadays these are usually supermarket sprouts that, like these ones, have travelled a long way from another country.

And a longer supply chain means a greater risk of contamination at one of the stages.

If I take something from my own sprouting tray, and I wash my hands after taking a shit, there’s probably no contamination risk. But every pair of hands that touched those sprouts from field to table means a greater risk of contamination and infection.

What’s interesting is the demographic profile of the infected people.

The dominant group is 45+, people around 50 years old.

Aware that they should take care of their health — but, as it turns out, not really aware of the side effects, risks, and what to do to avoid them.

There is a very simple way to avoid salmonella infection from sprouts:

Don’t eat sprouts!

No, alright, no extremism. Sprouts are cool.

Especially, as I wrote above, when they come from your own sprouter.

The shorter the supply chain, and the fewer intermediaries and kilometres between you and the producer, the lower the risk that the product will be contaminated and dangerous to you.

That’s why homegrown sprouts are best. There’s also another factor: you control hygiene and everything else at every stage. And you can be sure the product is safe.

If part of the field-to-table chain is outside your control, then of course we rely on compliance principles — meaning you trust that a legal supplier follows rules regarding cleanliness and microbiological safety.

Obviously, it would be safer if every batch were tested. But if every stage had to test every batch of those sprouts, they’d go bad before reaching the shop.

And even if they didn’t, in products with a long shelf life, it would still mean more time and enormous costs.

But there’s another side to the story. As always.

At the beginning of February 2024, there was a poisoning case in Poland involving meat jelly. One person died, and two others ended up in the hospital.

The supply chain was very short. The jelly was made by a farmer and his wife using meat from their own farm and was sold locally at a market.

Except during production, he added too much sodium nitrite — a substance used in small amounts for curing meat, but deadly dangerous in excessive quantities.

A local product from a local farmer, a small-scale, homemade — or as people now say, craft — producer carries a much higher risk that food poisoning or contamination will occur. Whether bacterial or, as in this case, chemical contamination through improper use of substances.

Mistakes happen. There may be no internal controls, no food safety procedures, no HACCP system, no staff hygiene training, etc., etc., etc.

In a large company, or corporation, there are always procedures and standards implemented for food production. Production is often randomly tested, and so on.

And of course, rules, procedures, restrictions, and regulations get broken. Counterfeit food is sold under famous brands too — olive oil on an almost industrial scale, for example — and of course, that bypasses sanitary control. Large food factories also experience contamination incidents.

And very often the source of the warning is the producer itself. Large food companies usually have HACCP food safety systems in place, obligating them to monitor their own production.

And of course, that control is not perfect. There’s corruption and all the rest. But the risk of contaminated food slipping through is much lower where procedures exist and breaking them is considered abnormal, than in places with no food safety procedures whatsoever.

Places where the owner’s dog runs onto the production floor, takes a shit, and runs off again.

A real example.

From gastronomy. In one place where they didn’t even ask for a sanitary health certificate, the medical tests for salmonella and such.

A businessman who has no idea what good manufacturing practices are, and thinks HACCP sounds like some secret mind-control weapon, walks into the pickle production area in boots covered in shit. Picks his nose with his fingers and grabs a pickle straight from the barrel.

So the problem is basically one between Scylla and Charybdis — impossible to solve cleanly.

As dietitians love to say, it depends.

Food safety, like the entire field-to-table chain, does not exist in a vacuum. It’s part of a socio-economic system built around the principle of profit.

If profit is the supreme principle, then of course it becomes acceptable — even necessary — to neglect food safety in the name of maximizing profit.

For example, by using glucose-fructose syrup instead of sugar. Because it’s cheaper. And even less healthy than regular sugar.

And that ideological horizon limits what solutions are possible without revolution.

Can we combine small, local, artisanal production with corporate order, procedures, and HACCP systems?

Of course.

And I regularly shop at one example of such a solution.

(They should start paying me for advertising.)

I mean the German cooperative supermarket chain EDEKA.

It operates exactly on that principle: local stores under one brand, connected in a network of equal entities. They have the power of a supermarket chain and supermarket-level procedures, but at the same time, each store — besides the shared product line (a huge range under Edeka and Edeka Bio brands) — also offers local products.

For example, potatoes from a field 6 km from the shop. Seriously, I checked.

So I get a short supply chain and food safety procedures for locally sourced food.

That kind of food distribution model is the best and most beneficial for customers. It combines the supermarket with the local market.

But Edeka was founded over a hundred years ago in a completely different era, when today’s supermarket chains and food corporations were only beginning to emerge.

In today’s food market, there’s basically no room for a newly created network like that.

Unless that path is carved out. At the expense of the corporations that currently control food markets.

And they watch developments very carefully and spare no expense on lobbying — legal and illegal.

The state would have to play an active role in carving out space for such a theoretical food cooperative. Through appropriate legislation — for example, by favouring this kind of ownership structure in contracts for producing food for schools.

And it’s obvious that dominant food corporations work very hard to make sure friendly politicians block such changes.

So, can we ensure food safety?

Though without a socialist revolution, it will be very difficult.

From Perugia, in central Italy, last week, a truck full of Kit Kats set off. Destination Poland. Along the way, supplying successive countries. And it disappeared!

Interestingly, according to the official statement from Nestle, it is not known where the truck disappeared.

I’m asking more than stating here, but do such vehicles probably have GPS trackers and are monitored by logistics in real time?

Did someone decide

that the holidays are coming, so fuck it! we’ll send out a faulty truck!

I wouldn’t be surprised.

What could have attracted the thieves is that these are not ordinary Kit Kats!

12 tons, 413,793 pieces from the new Formula 1 line. If it’s associated with racing, that’s right.

Last year, Kit Kat became the official bar of Formula 1, and the bars from this line are shaped like small racing cars.

I’d smash one. Out of curiosity. Despite my very negative opinion, the topic keeps coming back to sport and advertising alcohol or unhealthy food through sport.

And here it’s a perfect match, because looking at the damage that Formula 1 racing does to the environment, the more F1 drivers eat bars (even vegan ones, because there was such a Kit Kat line), the faster they’ll get obesity and the faster they’ll be gone and the better for the planet and all beings on this planet.

And the theft is probably the work of organized crime.

And not activists.

But a bit earlier, there was an attack on LPP Holding in Pardubice. Contrary to appearances, they don’t sew jeans. They make weapons. And sell them to Israel. And that was the reason for the attack by a pro-Palestinian group.

In Germany last year, there were attacks on transformer stations by a group of eco-primitivists.

You can guess where I’m going with this?

Such an almost symbolic transport as chocolates shaped like Formula 1 cars is the best symbol of capitalism since “Work 219: Landscape X” by H.R. Giger in Jello Biafra’s interpretation.

And it would be nothing unusual for an attack on such a symbol to be motivated ideologically. And pro-health.

When punks promoting a healthy lifestyle, that is straight edge, were radicalizing, they reached the point where they fuck up people for drinking beer at concerts.

Which, of course, was stupidity, because alcoholism is a systemic problem and should be solved systemically, just like the problem of obesity. Not attacked fat people, but steal trucks with sweets. For example.

Does anyone have a better way to solve the junk food problem?

Unless you practice zen while kneading dough for 20 minutes. But, quoting a classic, for that you need a lot of phlegm in you — and “in me there’s nothing but fury.”

If you make dough, bread, angel wings (faworki), or anything that needs long kneading, a planetary mixer is something you need.

You can buy a cheap mixer for around 300 zł, and in Germany, even below €100, up to several times that price. I’m talking about home equipment.

At the low end, it will usually be a mixer with only the basic functions. At the high end, you’ll find machines with a dozen attachments — for example, slicing attachments (which, for me, are completely unnecessary because I use such discs in my cooking processor), touch screens, and apps.

These apps usually contain ready-made recipes.

The question is: will you actually use them, or do you already have your own recipes?

My cooking processor came with an entire cookbook. I used it once.

When choosing a machine — apart from the size of your wallet — it’s worth thinking about which functions you’ll actually use.

Planetary mixers can:
mix, stir, whip foam, chop, grind, mince meat, grate, slice, dice, cut fries, or squeeze juice.
Each function requires a special attachment.

And at home, you don’t really need such an all-purpose tool.

Because if I need to grate one carrot, it’s better to take a hand grater than install an attachment on the machine and then wash it.
You’ll wash a grater in 6.5 seconds.

Same thing if you want to cut a few slices for sandwiches for two people. If you’re cutting for twenty, then sure.

There’s no point in overpaying for something you won’t use. When choosing a mixer (or any device, not only for the kitchen), ask yourself two damn important questions:

1. How much can I afford to pay for it?
2. What do I actually need and what will I really use?

And I warn you against thinking that if you buy a planetary mixer — or any device — you’ll suddenly start baking cakes or whipping egg whites.

A tool only makes sense if it makes work easier than you would do anyway.

And the third question — which really applies to all kitchen equipment:

Where will it stand?
Both when you are using it and when you are not.

This is especially important in modern apartments, which seem to be built for people who live on pizza delivered by Uber. These are not kitchens — they’re a fucking tragedy.

In my case, the planetary mixer is used mainly for making bread.
Which means the only attachment I use is the dough hook.

Bread: 10 minutes of kneading.
Rolls: 13 minutes.

And during that time, instead of kneading by hand, I can do something else.

That’s an important criterion when choosing kitchen equipment.

Is it kitchen plug-and-play?
A device where I throw in the ingredients, switch it on, and forget about it — ideally with a timer that switches it off by itself.

Or is it something that requires constant attention, like when making hummus with a hand blender, which you have to hold the whole time — while with a processor you switch it on, forget about it, and do something else.

When choosing a mixer, pay attention to the size of the bowl.

For home use, smaller is usually better than bigger.

If the bowl is too large compared to the amount of dough you’re kneading, it won’t knead properly.

But when it comes to power, go for as much as possible — over 1000 W.