European Council President António Costa suggested narrowing a controversial business tax to only apply to large firms with a turnover exceeding €750 million per year, two EU diplomats briefed on the discussions told POLITICO.

Costa hopes these concessions will facilitate an overall agreement on new EU-wide levies, known as own resources, which have emerged as a major stumbling bloc in the ongoing negotiations.

The idea was mentioned in meetings, known as “confessionals,” between Costa’s head of cabinet Pedro Lourtie and EU governments Thursday, to test the waters on the most sensitive aspects in the negotiations.

Lourtie overhauled an unpopular corporate tax known as CORE — which charges a lump sum on companies’ revenues exceeding €100 million — that the European Commission proposed last year.

According to his proposal, the EU would charge a 0.05% levy, as opposed to a lump sum. It would also only apply to firms with an annual turnover of more than €750 million.

These changes are expected to soften opposition among a group of countries led by Germany that challenged CORE on the grounds that it undermines competitiveness and takes a toll on medium-sized enterprises.

Going further

But two diplomats fear these concessions will not be enough to muster support for the new levy. “I don’t think this is going to solve the problem on CORE,” one told POLITICO. They, like others in this story, were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations.

France is pushing to introduce new taxes to reduce contributions to the EU budget.

In a concession to Paris, Costa’s team indicated that they won’t cut down on the total revenue projections from the Commission’s tax proposal from last year, which was expected to generate €65 billion annually. 

To generate additional resources for the budget, Costa’s team also suggested increasing two largely uncontroversial taxes on non-collected plastic and electronic waste that flows directly to the bloc’s budget by levying an additional 25 cents on each kilo.

The diplomats also proposed raising the share of a carbon imports’ tax that flows to the EU cash pot to 100% from the current 75%, and exploring levies on crypto firms and national spectrum auctions.

In a further concession, Lourtie suggested phasing in two taxes on tobacco products and polluting firms, known as the Emissions Trading System, for countries that are overwhelmingly affected.

Confessional diplomacy

The bilaterals, which started Thursday and will continue until next Monday, are expected to pave the way for a budget deal by the end of 2026 — before next year’s elections in Poland, France and Italy threaten to derail the negotiations.

Costa will put forward a new budget negotiating document on Nov. 21 ahead of a special summit the following week, said the two diplomats.

During Thursday’s meetings, Costa’s team signaled that the budget would be cut further, and reductions might affect regional funding known as cohesion policy.

That would be a major setback for an alliance of Southern and Eastern European countries, known as the Friends of Cohesion.

Cuts to farmers’ subsidies were deemed less likely, said the two diplomats.

CBD edibles have become a popular supplement for relaxation — but that hasn’t stopped the EU’s top court from taking a high-strung approach to the bloc’s food rules.

The Court of Justice of the EU ruled Thursday that CBD-based food products cannot be certified as organic. The hangup: they’re not technically legal on the EU market.

It’s a bummer for consumers looking to grab some gummies with CBD derived without pesticides — and for the Professional Hemp Trade Association, which launched the case in France.  

CBD, or cannabidiol, is a non-psychoactive chemical component found in marijuana that’s gained a reputation as a way to take a chill pill without getting high. In some European countries, wellness shops are using a legal grey zone to sell CBD products that aren’t explicitly marketed for human consumption — often with a wink.   

In France, some hemp sellers wanted to sell them with an organic label. But the the judges shut that down. 

The European Commission classifies natural CBD as a so-called novel food, and it has yet to receive authorization to be sold on the EU market.  

The hemp sellers had challenged the refusal by France’s National Institute for Origin and Quality to grant organic certification to CBD edibles.  

The high court said that CBD can be certified as organic only after it is authorized for sale on the EU market.  

The certification is more than a decorative badge, the court reasoned, saying it “conveys a more general promise of quality and acceptance of a given product in the eyes of consumers, with this positive image being an intended commercial effect.” Putting it on a product that has not been approved for sale could be misleading. The Court’s ruling is also consistent with earlier national-level measures. 

The organic label setback looks to be the least of hemp sellers’ problems in France: Paris ordered edible CBD products to be pulled from the shelves completely this past May.  

The post The grocery store shortcuts that make weeknight dinners easier appeared first on Salon.com.

Amazon and Uber are teaming up to make Uber Eats the official restaurant delivery partner for Prime subscribers in the US. The news comes as Uber faces a drastically reshaped competitive landscape with the merging of rivals DoorDash and Instacart.

Under the new partnership, Amazon Prime subscribers will get $0 delivery fees on restaurant orders of $25 or more directly through Amazon's app or website - without having to use Uber Eats or even create an account. Essentially, Amazon Prime subscribers who never bothered to sign up for Uber can now order takeout without needing to create an Uber account.

Prime members can order Uber Eats takeo …

Read the full story at The Verge.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission is preparing a more cautious roadmap for Ukraine’s EU accession negotiations, setting out limited targets for progress in 2027 while avoiding any commitment to a membership date, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.

Brussels has long sought to bring Ukraine closer to the EU in a broader effort to secure its future after Russia’s war, with eventual membership seen as a way to anchor Kyiv firmly in European institutions and make renewed Russian aggression more difficult.

In the document, Brussels calls on Kyiv to “urgently and significantly step up the pace of the rule of law reforms.” Meeting key requirements in this area in the first half of 2027 is necessary before negotiations in individual policy areas can be provisionally concluded, the roadmap says.

The document, part of the Commission’s enlargement package to be presented Wednesday, identifies seven policy areas in which Ukraine could provisionally complete negotiations next year. It highlights how far Ukraine still has to go before joining the bloc — and the difficulty of delivering the necessary reforms while fighting a war.

Decoupling from Moldova

The document also underscores a growing divergence between Ukraine and Moldova, whose membership bids have long advanced in parallel. Moldova is now seen as being in a position to make substantially faster progress, raising the prospect that the two countries’ membership bids will effectively be decoupled.

While Brussels is targeting progress in seven policy areas for Ukraine in 2027, Moldova could complete negotiations in more than 20, the document shows.

Ukraine applied to join the EU on Feb. 28, 2022, just four days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Moldova and Ukraine secured candidate status together in June 2022 and formally launched membership negotiations on the same day in June 2024.

Since then, Kyiv has completed a detailed examination of how its laws compare with EU rules and negotiations have formally opened across several major policy areas. In October, Ukraine and Moldova both opened talks covering the EU’s internal market, competitiveness and economic growth.

A long way to go

Joining the EU requires far more than a political commitment. Candidate countries must bring their laws and institutions into line with EU standards across 35 negotiating areas, known in Brussels jargon as chapters. These range from agriculture and food safety to competition rules, judicial independence and foreign policy.

The Commission’s roadmap identifies only seven such areas in which Ukraine could provisionally finish negotiations in 2027. Education and culture is targeted for the first half of the year, followed by intellectual property, employment and social policy, industrial policy, research, external relations, and foreign and security policy in the second half.

The Commission acknowledges that the changes are complex and require extensive consultations, time and resources. To help Ukraine make progress, Brussels has established a dedicated task force to provide additional support to Ukrainian authorities.

The difficulties are compounded by the war, which places extraordinary demands on Ukraine’s government and parliament as they seek to pass and implement the legislation required for EU membership.

The Commission is careful in the document not to commit to an end date for Ukraine’s accession negotiations, taking a similarly cautious approach toward other EU membership frontrunners, including Albania and Moldova. Montenegro is the exception, with June 2027 envisaged as a target for signing an accession treaty.

Ukraine’s roadmap describes itself as a “living document” that can be updated as talks progress, leaving open the possibility of completing negotiations in additional policy areas sooner if reforms advance faster than expected.

The shadow of war

The uncertainty also reflects the wider challenge of admitting a country still fighting an existential war.

EU rules do not explicitly prohibit a country at war from becoming a member, but Ukraine’s accession would raise difficult questions about security, territory and the obligations EU countries would assume toward a fellow member under the bloc’s mutual assistance provisions.

Even a peace settlement would not automatically resolve those questions or remove the need for Ukraine to complete its reforms. And finishing negotiations in individual policy areas would still leave Kyiv facing further steps before membership, including an accession treaty requiring approval and ratification.

The Commission also wants talks on Ukraine’s two stalled negotiating clusters to begin by the end of 2026. These are cluster 4, covering the green agenda and sustainable connectivity, and cluster 5, covering resources, agriculture and cohesion.

The document states that the Commission considers Ukraine to have met the necessary conditions and urges the accession conference to make every effort to open the outstanding clusters before the end of the year.

Opening them would allow Ukraine to advance negotiations across the remaining policy areas, although the pace of subsequent progress will remain dependent on reforms and the relevant decisions by member countries.

When I was in Japan last month, we went to an okonomiyaki restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan. It was called Denko Sekka, in Canal City Hakata, a shopping center. (Denko Sekka means "lightning fast.")

Okonomiyaki is basically a kind of pancake or crepe cooked on a griddle. — Read the rest

The post A Fukuoka okonomiyaki shop will give you its 10-pound pancake for free, if you can finish it in 40 minutes appeared first on Boing Boing.

Poland’s long-simmering rule-of-law issue reached boiling point this weekend. So, what now?

On today’s show, Zoya Sheftalovich and Kathryn Carlson unpack Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s efforts to undo judicial appointments made under the previous right-wing Law and Justice government. Tusk’s administration argues that removing these PiS-era appointees is essential to bringing Poland back into line with EU rule-of-law standards. But after this weekend’s turmoil, could the push backfire? And what could it mean for Tusk’s support ahead of next year’s elections?

Then, on to a crisis closer to home: Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever offered his resignation to King Philippe Monday morning, after failing to reach a budget agreement for 2027. Does that mean the government will collapse? Zoya and Katie go through what happens next.

And finally, RFK Jr.’s Make American Healthy Again campaign is coming to Brussels … at least when it comes to ultra-processed foods.

What are your thoughts on unhealthy, processed snacks and junk food? How should the bloc tackle them? Write in and let us know: You’ll find us on WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

• Crisis over top court shapes Poland’s battle lines before 2027 election.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s food fight is coming to Brussels.
• King mulls De Wever’s resignation as Belgian budget talks fail.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission will assess how well supermarkets are prepared to handle cyberattacks after refrigerators in dozens of stores across at least six EU countries were taken offline.

EU Agriculture and Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen told POLITICO that the attacks would be discussed at the next meeting of its Security College to assess retailers’ contingency plans and their ability to respond to incidents.

“Europe’s food supply chain must be prepared for new and evolving threats,” Hansen said. “The repeated cyberattacks on supermarkets are deeply concerning, causing economic losses for retailers and empty shelves for consumers.”

The announcement follows dozens of supermarkets across Europe reporting disruptions to their refrigeration and freezing systems on Monday.

Incidents were reported in at least six EU countries — Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands and Estonia — with some retailers reporting that refrigerator temperatures had suddenly surged to as high as 50 degrees Celsius.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen set up the Commission’s Security College in March 2025 to discuss strategic developments and threats to the EU’s internal and external security.

The Security College format lets commissioners examine attacks beyond their immediate impact on retailers. It also places the disruptions in the broader context of Europe’s vulnerability to hybrid warfare, where attacks on essential supply chains can be used to undermine public confidence.

The Security College meets periodically, separately from the Commission’s regular weekly meetings. On Friday, the Security College discussed the timing of its next meeting, but no date has been set, although heads of cabinet attending the planning meeting agreed it should take place soon, according to an EU official granted anonymity to discuss the behind-closed-door gathering.

The Security College is chaired by von der Leyen and attended by all her commissioners.

The latest disruptions follow a series of cyberattacks in France in October, when hackers appeared to remotely manipulate refrigeration systems by activating their defrosting mechanisms, causing temperatures to rise sharply and food to spoil.

In October, Commission agriculture officials met retailers affected by cyberattacks to take stock of the situation as part of the EU’s food security contingency and preparedness efforts. “We must work at every level to strengthen our preparedness and resilience,” Hansen said.

The commissioner stressed that Europe’s food security is not at risk, but warned that these incidents exposed vulnerabilities in the food supply chain, with consequences for businesses, food waste and consumer confidence.

“These are a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumers’ confidence in it — a warning that we must take seriously,” Hansen said.

BRUSSELS — Refrigerators in dozens of supermarkets in at least five EU countries were out of service on Monday, local news outlets reported, in what appears to be a repeat of cyberattacks that hit French stores last month.

As of Monday afternoon, there were news reports of incidents affecting supermarkets in Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands and Estonia. 

Several store managers told local media that refrigerator temperatures suddenly spiked to up to 50 degrees Celsius. This mirrors the French incidents last month, in which attackers appeared to remotely manipulate the fridges’ defrosting mechanisms so that they overheated.

It’s not confirmed that the attacks are connected or used the same software vulnerabilities that hit French chains, though one supermarket spokesperson said the incident is a cyberattack “similar to the one in France.”

Ken Munro, a cybersecurity researcher, said in an interview that supermarkets should have disconnected their refrigerators and the devices used to monitor and remotely manage them from the Internet. “I don’t accept any other excuse … particularly in light of the earlier [attacks in France],” he said.

Inti De Ceukelaire, another cyber researcher, also said the incident suggests supermarkets did not take the necessary steps even after the France attacks. “It seems that some of them simply did not get patched, which is quite ridiculous,” he said.

Belgian media reported on Monday morning that temperatures in supermarket refrigerators had suddenly spiked, forcing them to throw food away. A spokesperson for the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium said the agency is “closely” following the incident, adding that the attackers are unknown and that it “may never be possible to identify them.”

John Billow, director of Sweden’s National Cyber Security Centre, told POLITICO that there are “similarities” to the French incidents and that the agency is in touch with affected organizations. A European Commission spokesperson said it’s aware of the incidents and is using the EU-Cyclone network to coordinate and share information.

Following France

French supermarkets were hit with a wave of similar incidents in mid-October, when attackers targeted refrigerators by Danfoss, a Danish manufacturer of store fridges. Danfoss did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The attacks in France triggered a response from the country’s prime minister and its cybersecurity agency.

Belgian supermarket chain Delhaize alerted its store managers early on Monday morning of problems with refrigerators, and Belgian broadcaster RTBF cited a store manager as saying that the problems were due to a cyberattack like those in France.

A spokesperson for the company said it is aware of an “IT incident affecting the refrigeration systems in a number of Delhaize stores.” A spokesperson for Colruyt, which operates Spar stores in Belgium, said in a statement that fridges in “around five” Spar stores have been affected. “We are currently doing everything we can to resolve the issue,” they said, adding that no Colruyt stores have been affected. 

A Carrefour spokesperson confirmed that 15 of its 700 stores have been affected, and that none of its larger “hypermarket” stores are among them. All stores remain open, they said.

Stores in Sweden have also been hit. A spokesperson for supermarket chain ICA confirmed an “incident overnight affecting a small number of ICA stores operating outside ICA’s central network” which affected its fridges and freezers. 

A Coop spokesperson said seven of its 800 stores were affected but the situation, which is “contained and under control.” In one case, a refrigeration system began to generate heat, they said. Last month in France, the attacks caused at least one fire.

Like the public authorities, cyber researchers are looking for signs of who may be responsible. The fact that the attacks have happened again is evidence to suggest a hostile nation could be behind the attacks rather than young hacker pranksters, De Ceukelaire said. Munro, however, said he believes a “copycat” is behind Monday’s attacks.

“This won’t be the end of it,” Munro added. “There will be more.”

This article has been updated.

Walmart recently published a list of things it promises not to do to its customers.

“We price the product, not the person,” Walmart CEO John Furner announced in a September letter to customers. “Your income, shopping history, urgency or what we think you could pay won’t change the price,” he promised. Nor, he said, would the retailer’s AI shopping assistant, Sparky, use information customers shared to raise prices or conceal cheaper options.

This was nice to hear. I hadn’t previously considered that telling a computer I needed toilet paper might result in an emergency toilet-paper rate. There is something faintly unnerving about the specificity of a corporate reassurance, particularly when it introduces several possibilities you hadn’t thought to worry about.

It made me preemptively nostalgic for the little paper price tag beneath a box of cereal. There’s something reassuringly stupid about it. It tells you what the cereal costs. It doesn’t know how much money you make, whether you’re in a hurry or what the temperature is outside. Unless an employee comes along with a new sticker, the person reaching for the same box ten minutes later sees the same number. A modest achievement, perhaps, but one I’m growing increasingly fond of.

The appeal isn’t really the paper. It’s the transparency of the arrangement. As retailers gather more information about their customers and acquire increasingly sophisticated pricing tools, shoppers risk knowing less about why they’re paying what they’re paying. The problem isn’t simply higher grocery bills. It’s the possibility of a transaction in which one side can examine the other in exquisite detail, while the other can barely see the rules.

What prompted the letter from Furner is that Walmart is expanding its use of electronic shelf labels, little screens that let employees update prices digitally from a central computer instead of replacing stickers by hand. The change makes sense. Furner points out that updating paper tags is tedious work, and he’d rather employees spend their afternoons helping customers than tending to a small forest of adhesive rectangles. Digital labels can also help ensure the price on the shelf matches the price at checkout.

And electronic labels aren’t, in themselves, surge pricing. Walmart says it doesn’t use them to change prices according to who is shopping or the time of day. But efficiency is a different question from trust. Making a price easier to change isn’t necessarily a problem. Making it harder to understand how that price was reached might be.

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We’ve already accepted a surprisingly elaborate set of conditions for saving money on groceries. Download the app. Make an account. Remember the password. Clip the digital coupon before you leave home. After handing over our personal information and completing several minor administrative tasks, we’re permitted to save 75 cents on yogurt. The store, meanwhile, gets a rather detailed account of our preferences. What happens when that bargain runs in reverse?

Last December, Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative found that shoppers using Instacart were sometimes shown different prices for identical groceries from the same store at the same time. At one Safeway in Washington, D.C., an 18-ounce box of Signature SELECT Corn Flakes appeared for $2.99, $3.49 and $3.69, depending on whose screen you were looking at. 

Instacart said the shoppers were assigned to pricing experiments randomly, not sorted by income, demographics or browsing history. It ended the tests after the investigation. That distinction matters, especially because the research didn’t establish that anyone’s personal habits were being used against them. But it demonstrated how quietly prices can diverge when the shopper sees only the number assigned to her. You can’t question a difference you have no way of seeing.

I buy a lot of black beans. Enough, presumably, that a supermarket’s software could identify me as a woman with firm opinions about legumes. If that earns me a coupon, wonderful. I’m considerably less enthusiastic about the possibility of an algorithm deciding that my apparent dependence on black beans means I could stand to pay another 30 cents per can. It’s one thing to recognize a loyal customer. It’s another to recognize a captive audience.

Other pricing algorithms raise different questions (McDonald’s, for instance, faces a lawsuit alleging AI-assisted price coordination among franchises, which the company denies). Prices have always fluctuated; coupons have always rewarded some shoppers more than others. Nor should computers be banished from the business of deciding what things cost. But the supermarket is not an airline, and dinner should not require the same vigilance as booking a flight.

Walmart’s promise is worth taking seriously. The company has drawn a clear line around how it says it will use customer information, and that’s preferable to leaving shoppers guessing. But it’s a corporate commitment, not a rule every retailer must follow. And the fact that a supermarket now feels obliged to assure us it won’t charge extra because we seem hurried or financially comfortable suggests how strange our expectations have become.

Perhaps it’s naive to want a supermarket not to use what it knows about me against me. Still, I don’t need the price tag to know me. I need it to tell me what the cereal costs.

The post The strange new math behind the price of your groceries appeared first on Salon.com.

BRUSSELS — The Make America Healthy Again crusade against Big Food is crossing the Atlantic.

Donald Trump’s health secretary has made packaged, mass-produced munchies one of the targets of his health agenda. And while Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s broadsides against vaccines have alarmed Brussels he has found an ally in the European Commission on this pillar of the MAHA mission.

Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi — former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s man in Brussels — has backed Kennedy’s push, saying Europe and the U.S. share an ambition to tackle unhealthy diets. 

“I welcome the US – including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – putting a stronger spotlight on this agenda including the #eatrealfood campaign,” Várhelyi wrote on LinkedIn after his appearance at the USA-EU Transatlantic Business Summit in Brussels earlier this year.

But sharing an ambition is the easy part. Deciding what ultra-processed food is — and whether or how it should be regulated: not so much.

At the heart of the debate is a growing body of research linking UPFs to conditions such as obesity and diabetes, risks everyone says they want to reduce. But the challenge is translating that evidence into public health policy without dictating what people eat. 

For industry, the priority is protecting personal choice. For public health advocates, the problem is systemic. What appears to be an individual choice is often the result of inequality, they argue — influenced by income, education and a food environment that can make healthier options harder to access.

The issue has been pitting health advocates against Big Food companies on multiple continents for years now — but global momentum is moving toward regulation as the World Health Organization prepares to unveil new tools to help policymakers this week. 

The “million dollar question,” as health activist Liz Arnanz put it, is how to define ultra-processed foods. 

The term might bring to mind salty chips, preservative-filled pastries and sugary drinks, but that category can also include whole-grain bread or fortified yogurt.

“We are seeing a huge increase of deaths linked to unhealthy diets,” said Arnanz, of the NCD Alliance, an NGO fighting against noncommunicable diseases. Not only are UPFs usually “high in fats and sugar and sodium,” she argued, but there is also “an independent unhealthiness layer of the processing of food.”

Her last point is a controversial one, directly disputed by industry and up for debate among scientists. Where health advocates see cheap junk food that’s chemically engineered to be addictive, the industry can point to innovations that make products more nutritious, less expensive and safer to eat, for longer.

Echoes of the tobacco debate

For all the increasingly tough talk around UPFs from both Kennedy and Várhelyi, concrete regulation remains scarce in both Washington and Brussels. 

Latin America has arguably been the trailblazer, with Brazil a leading example. It became one of the first countries to explicitly tell its population to avoid UPFs, and backed this up with rules to limit them in schools. On the international level, the WHO is developing its own global guidance, with plans to present a food profiling tool intended to help governments decide on UPF regulations on Monday at an event in Nuremberg, Germany.

The global health body has come down hard on the UPF industry. It accused it in a 2024 report of using the same playbook as alcohol and tobacco industries “to influence entire systems,” from “political lobbying and spreading misinformation and disinformation in the media, to harmful financial practices, and targeted marketing strategies directed at children and young people.”

Connecting the consumption of processed foods with the tobacco and fossil fuel industries is “irresponsible and outrageously misleading,” said Rafael Sampson, a senior manager for public affairs at the trade association FoodDrinkEurope. The WHO report, he added, “ignores” that the science around UPFs remains contested.

Carrots or taxes

European health advocates are convinced that Brussels should act, but they’re divided over which tools to use — and how far to take the tobacco comparison. 

Suzy Sumner, who heads the Brussels office of the Foodwatch advocacy group, takes a page from the playbook against cigarettes and alcohol, backing taxes on junk food, marketing restrictions to children and front-of-pack labels. 

Marleen Kestens, manager for cardiovascular disease prevention policies at the European Heart Network, backs more positive incentives, adding that food should not be treated like tobacco.

“We would be much more in favor of subsidizing those products that people should consume more of, rather than having taxes on products that people should eat less,” Kestens said.

The Commission, meanwhile, is waiting for the results of a study on the potential health risks of UPFs, set to land in March 2027. Until then, it is reluctant to “prejudge the outcomes,” the Commission said in a statement to POLITICO. 

Despite a “growing body of evidence,” the statement said, “certain impacts (such as environmental and social) are less well explored at present.”

One thing that’s off the table: The Commission “of course has no intention to decide what citizens should eat or not,” the statement stressed. 

In fact, the Commission did flirt with using taxes to discourage people from buying unhealthy UPFs, in a leaked draft of its plan to tackle cardiovascular disease. But that dropped out of the final version. 

Instead, Várhelyi told MEPs early this year, the idea is to “use financial incentives to push the industry to reformulate the products” while trying to inform consumers about UPF health risks. 

Those types of policies are more likely to get buy-in from manufacturers. After all, the sector has already been working on both tasks “for decades,” said Sara Lamonaca, FoodDrinkEurope’s director of consumer information, nutrition and health.

The Commission’s caution on moving forward sits awkwardly with Europe’s deep-rooted resistance to food industrialization. Both at national and EU level, regulators have hardly shied away from limiting what ends up on citizens’ plates, from restrictions on genetically modified vegetables to a ban on selling plant-based meat substitutes under names like “veggie bacon.” 

“Regulating ultra-processed food and the food environments more broadly is something where the European region is lagging behind,” NCD Alliance’s Arnanz said.

America first

Even Washington has gone further than Brussels in turning words into action. The U.S. is currently moving toward a first definition of ultra-processed food. Back in January, Kennedy announced new dietary guidelines, warning Americans against highly processed foods and calling for a reduction in sugar intake.

“It’s beyond Europe now,” said Foodwatch’s Sumner. “It’s out of the box in a way now, and I think it’s going to be very difficult to try to pull back and say, ‘Oh, actually, no, there is no problem with these products at all.’”

The industry is adamant that the focus shouldn’t be on the P-word: “There is not enough evidence to use the level of processing as a basis for issuing dietary recommendations or public health policy,” Lamonaca said.

As the U.S. midterms and Brussels’ UPF study deadline draw closer, expect the lobbying to intensify on both sides of the Atlantic.

“The fight will be huge as usual,” said Kestens.

Editor’s note, November 1, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary. The one below was originally published in August 2025.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

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I typically eat vegetarian, and have considered going fully vegan out of concern for animal welfare. But lately my on-again, off-again gastrointestinal problems have been acting up, and I’ve had to go back on a more restricted diet to manage my symptoms — no spice, no garlic or onions, nothing acidic, and nothing caffeinated. Sticking to a “bland” diet is hard enough, but doing so while vegetarian is very difficult when things like tomatoes and onions and grapefruits are off the table.

I know a lot of people with these issues eat fish or meat, and some medical professionals recommend drinking chicken bone broth to soothe flare-ups. I don’t want to abandon my commitment to animal welfare while my gut sorts itself out, but my food options are limited right now. How should I approach this?

Dear Would-Be Vegetarian, 

You’re not alone in finding it hard to stick to a purely vegetarian diet. Only 5 percent of American adults say they’re vegetarian or vegan. What’s more, one study found that 84 percent of people who adopt those diets actually go back to eating meat at some point. And most of them aren’t even dealing with the gastrointestinal problems you face. 

So, it speaks to the depth of your moral commitment that you’re really wrestling with this. I’ll have some concrete suggestions for you in a bit, but first I want to emphasize that how you approach the question of meat-eating will depend on your underlying moral theory. 

There’s a classic split in moral philosophy between deontologists and utilitarians. A deontologist is someone who thinks an action is moral if it’s fulfilling a duty — and we have universal duties like, “always treat others as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.” From that perspective, killing an animal for food would be inherently morally wrong, because you’re treating the animal as a means to an end. 

Meanwhile, a utilitarian is someone who thinks that an action is moral if it produces good consequences — and behaving morally means producing the most happiness or well-being possible, or reducing the most suffering possible. Utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer argue that we should be reducing, and ideally eliminating, the suffering that animals endure at our hands. 

Deontologists and utilitarians are often pitted against each other, but they actually have one big thing in common: They both believe in a universal moral principle — whether it’s “always treat others as ends in themselves” or “always maximize happiness.” 

A lot of people find that comforting, because it offers certainty about how we should act. Even if acting morally requires hard sacrifices, it’s incredibly soothing to think, “If I just do X, then I’ll know for sure that I’m being a good person!” 

But these moral theories assume that all the complexity of human life can be reduced to one tidy formula. Can it, really? 

Another school of philosophy — pragmatism — says we should be skeptical of fixed moral principles. Human life is so complicated, with many different factors at play in any ethical dilemma, so we should be pluralistic about what makes outcomes valuable instead of acting like the only thing that matters is maximizing a single value (say, happiness). And human society is always evolving, so a moral idea that makes sense in one context may no longer make sense in a different context. To a pragmatist, moral truths are contingent, not universal and unchanging. 

I think one pragmatist who can really help you out is the University of Michigan’s Elizabeth Anderson. In a 2005 essay applying pragmatism to the question of eating meat, the philosopher points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although certain non-Western societies did ascribe moral worth to some animals).

“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals (other than our pets),” Anderson writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”

In other words, Anderson doesn’t think there’s some universal rule like “eating animals is inherently morally wrong.” It’s our social and technological circumstances that have made us more able than before to see animals as part of our moral circle. She also doesn’t believe there’s a single yardstick — like sentience or intelligence — by which we can judge how much of our moral concern an animal deserves. That’s because moral evaluation isn’t just about animals’ intrinsic capacities, but also about their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, say, or whether they live independently in the wild. 

It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us. Killing bedbugs? Totally fine! They may be sentient, but, Anderson writes, “We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace. To one-sidedly accommodate their interests…would amount to surrender.”

Anderson’s point is not that animals’ intelligence and sentience don’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.

With this pragmatic approach in mind, you can consider how to balance your concern for animal welfare with your concern for your own welfare. Instead of thinking in terms of a moral absolute that would force you into a “purist” diet no matter the cost to you, you can consider a “reducetarian” diet, which allows you to ease your own struggle while also taking care for animals seriously. 

The key thing to realize is that some types of animal consumption cause a lot less suffering than others. 

For one thing, if you’re eating meat, try to buy the pasture-raised kind and not the kind that comes from factory farms — the huge industrialized facilities that supply 99 percent of America’s meat. In these facilities, animals are tightly packed together and live under unbelievably harsh and unsanitary conditions. They’re also often mutilated without pain relief: think pigs being castrated, cows being dehorned, and hens being debeaked. Oh, and chickens have been bred to be so big that they’re in constant pain; they live miserable lives from start to finish.

A pasture-raised label doesn’t mean an animal has been spared all of the harms of modern agriculture — it doesn’t guarantee that pain relief is used for painful procedures, and farm animals across different production systems have been bred to maximize production, which can take a toll on their welfare. And of course they’ll ultimately meet the same fate as those raised on factory farms — slaughter. But your goal here is to meaningfully reduce, not 100 percent eliminate, the harms. And at least pasture-raised animals have gotten to roam around in a field and engage in natural behaviors up until the end.

It’s a similar story for fish, by the way. More than half of the fish we eat comes from fish farms, which are basically just underwater factory farms. Wild-caught fish is not perfect — slow, suffocating deaths are common — but it’s better than farmed.

The caveat here is that a lot of the welfare labels you’ll see on animal products are basically a con. And some certification schemes have similar names, so you have to pay close attention. If you see the label “Certified Humane,” that’s genuinely higher-welfare — but don’t mistake it for “American Humane Certified,” which is really not. And be wary of putting much stock in labels like “cage-free” or “free-range.” They’re better than nothing, but because the terms are often ill-defined and unenforced, they’re not as meaningful as you might think. Here’s a good guide to separating the real deal from the advertising spin. 

Another classic recommendation among animal welfare advocates is to eat bigger animals — in other words, go for beef rather than chicken. That’s both because of how miserable chickens’ lives are on factory farms and because, as my former colleague Kelsey Piper has written, it just takes way more chicken lives than cow lives to feed people. Cows are huge, producing about 500 pounds of beef apiece, while a chicken yields only a few pounds of meat. So, every year, the average American eats about 23 chickens and just over one-tenth of one cow.

That said, cows take a heavier toll on the climate than chickens do, so you don’t want to eat tons of beef either. The environment is also one of the key values at stake in our consumption choices, so that has to factor in, too.

Of course, another possibility — to the extent that this works with your gastrointestinal issues — is to reach for low-fiber plant-based foods like tofu, seitan, and the smorgasbord of newer products now available (like Beyond and Impossible burgers). 

But assuming you’re going to eat meat, it’s a good idea to set some clear parameters and standards around your reducetarian diet. A lot of reducetarians — myself included — have fallen into the trap of saying, “I’ll reduce how much meat I eat,” but forgetting to quantify what that means. That can lead you to eat more meat than you’d intended. So it’s probably better to commit to something like “weekday vegetarian” or “vegan before six” — you can check out the Reducetarian Foundation for suggestions. 

At the end of the day, remember that there’s a plurality of values at stake here, and no one of them necessarily trumps all the others. If you feel that eating some meat is important for your well-being right now, and you try to do that in ways that keep suffering for animals to a minimum, I don’t think you need to feel bad about that. That’s because you won’t be shirking your values: You’ll be recognizing that your values are plural, and you’re doing your best to balance between them. That may be the best any of us can really do.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• The blogger Bentham’s Bulldog published a piece titled “How to cause less suffering while eating animals.” It contains some of the same recommendations I mentioned above, but the underlying ethical framework is different and it makes one recommendation I didn’t: “offsetting” your meat consumption by donating to highly effective animal charities. I worry that offsetting might create a moral hazard, as with people offsetting their carbon emissions and then potentially feeling free to fly more. But it’s worth considering, particularly if you pair it with clear parameters around your reducetarian diet. 

• This Aeon essay answers a question I’ve often wondered about: Why haven’t other animals — say, birds — developed complex civilizations like we humans have? Why don’t they build rocket ships, argue about economic policy, and play canasta? I’m grateful to the evolutionary biologist who wrote this piece for finally giving me a satisfying answer.

• I can’t stop thinking about this post on how AI companies may have designed chatbots to play an underspecified “helpful assistant” character who, due to being underspecified, looks to the internet for examples of how to play that role, finds tons of science fiction about cheesy robots, and thus starts to behave like a cheesy sci-fi robot (ChatGPT will say things like, “Gee, that really tickles my circuits!”). This post is mega-long, deeply trippy, and worth reading.

These Philly Cheesesteak Egg Rolls live up to the online hype. We took our years of experience making egg rolls and applied it to this American twist on them. They’re pretty easy to make, with no shortage of melty cheese, sweet onions, and beef!  A Beloved American Egg Roll  In spite of how popular Philly […]

MONTREAL — Canada embraced the European Union’s offer of “associate membership” after a two-day summit at which Brussels and Ottawa gave themselves until next June to work out what their new relationship will look like.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s endorsement of the proposal by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen followed weeks of hesitation, a hostile response from U.S. President Donald Trump and pushback from EU heavyweight Germany.

“In the coming months, we will determine the full substance, scale, and scope of this new form of membership,” Carney told a press conference on Friday at the end of the two-day summit at the Port of Montreal. 

“Today, we move towards associate membership for Canada,” Carney said, describing it as “the deepest possible partnership short of accession.”

The two sides have set a June 2027 deadline to determine the terms and boundaries of their intensifying relationship — an alliance that comes with a payment schedule. Carney danced around a question pressing him on how much associate membership will cost the Canadian public.

“We don’t view this as paying, personally,” Carney said, stressing the alliance as a “positive” project.

Von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa, standing either side of Carney, presented the experiment as a necessary survival strategy to thrive in an increasingly dangerous world.

“The concept of an associate member is uncharted territory but we have the ambition, trust and creativity to shape it together,” Von der Leyen told reporters. “To be crystal clear, this is not a partnership against anybody, but for our common strength.”

Canadian government officials who spoke to reporters after the press conference confirmed legislation won’t be necessary to legitimize Canada’s EU associate membership status.

“Our relationship is so special that we want to create something new — to go beyond a simple association, everything short of a full EU membership,” said Costa, pitching a new model for non-European countries to integrate more closely with the bloc. “Our association will be the closest, deepest and most unique of its kind.”

Irritants persist

Despite the upbeat rhetoric, some longstanding trade disputes remained unresolved after the summit.

Carney told reporters the two sides had reached an agreement on carveouts from a landmark EU anti-deforestation law, but Canadian government officials subsequently walked back his assertion.

The issue remains part of ongoing trade discussions, one official said, noting progress in addressing what Canada views as flaws in the legislation. The officials were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic and trade negotiations.

Another irritant has been whether Canada would qualify for “Made in Europe” status under the EU’s Industrial Accelerator Act, a landmark measure that would seek to channel public procurement spending in sectors ranging from green energy to automotive toward locally produced goods. 

Von der Leyen said the regulation proposed earlier this year by the Commission foresaw including Canada as a free-trade partner, but added that it was now subject to review by EU lawmakers and governments.

“The Industrial Accelerator Act has been proposed by the Commission to include all countries with whom we have free-trade agreements. So automatically Canada would be in,” she said in response to a question. 

“Of course now the proposal has to go through the co-legislative process. But our proposal is very clear in including Canada.”

Despite months of preparations, the summit itself was chaotic, with agenda details confirmed at short notice and bilateral meetings split between two locations. The informal arrangements were intended to encourage more face time between EU commissioners and Canadian ministers, who are set to see much more of each other.

Canadian ministers have been invited to attend more meetings with their EU counterparts as part of a plan to deepen political alignment. Recent participation by Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand and International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu in informal EU meetings has served as a trial run.

Carney himself is expected in Dublin in two weeks, having accepted Costa’s invitation to join an informal European Council meeting.

Hideo Kojima has crafted unforgettable gaming experiences, from the Metal Gear and Death Stranding franchises to the infamous P.T., which was intended as a playable teaser for a new Silent Hill game with Kojima at the helm. His upcoming horror project, OD, just received an intriguing new visual, offering a tiny peek into a project audiences still know very little about. 

According to the Kojima Productions account on X, the poster will be part of the Beyond the Strand Exhibition, a showcase celebrating the studio’s tenth anniversary. It features actress Sophia Lillis, who audiences will recognize from her turn as young Beverly Marsh in the It films, gazing up at a mysterious red object. It might be a broom, judging by the cluster of what appears to be crimson straw at bottom – but knowing the minds behind this project, it could be anything. 

The rest of the poster is very simple. Apart from Sophia and the potential broom, the background is white, matching the shirt Sophia is wearing. Above her head, nearly invisible against the background, reads the tagline: “For all players and screamers.” 

◤ #BeyondTheStrand ◢

A new visual for OD – KNOCK has been revealed at the exhibition!

The iconic red door from the teaser trailer has also been physically recreated in the event space!
Come experience the world of OD – KNOCK up close with this special display!… pic.twitter.com/p6JGmrJ2b6

— KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS (Eng) (@KojiPro2015_EN) October 30, 2026

Hideo Kojima’s New Horror Game ‘OD’ Gets a Creepy New Teaser, and Fans Have Questions

OD was first announced in 2023, and since then, Kojima hasn’t given audiences much to go on, though it seems more in the interest of mystery than a lack of news. Back in September of this year, while appearing at the Tokyo Game Showcase, he revealed that production had resumed following the SAG strike, including performance capture and ADR recording. He also praised Sophia’s performance, along with her costar, Hunter Schafer, who will also appear in the game. 

It seems that OD will follow an anthology format, with each playable segment being crafted by a different director, a group that Kojima has referred to as his “horror Avengers”. Filmmaker Jordan Peele is involved with the project, and considering Jordan is behind such horror hits as Us, Get Out, and NOPE, it’s incredibly exciting to hear that he is involved with OD. 

Along with Sophia and Hunter, the cast includes the late actor Udo Kier. Apart from starring as Jules in Euphoria and Tigris Snow in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Hunter has explored the horror genre before, including a leading role as Gretchen in Cuckoo. Fans of the horror game genre may recognize Udo from his voice acting as Erich in Martha Is Dead, in addition to his film and television roles. 

An official release window hasn’t been announced yet, but players can expect to dive into the terrifying world of OD on Xbox and PC when the game does come out. 

The post Hideo Kojima Just Revealed a Mysterious New Poster for His Upcoming Horror Game ‘OD’ appeared first on VICE.

I have a very specific fantasy about the restaurant I would open, should someone ever hand me a set of keys and an unlimited supply of funds and optimism. It would be a little neighborhood bistro, the sort of place where the wine comes in mismatched stemless glasses thrifted from estate sales. The menus would be illustrated by hand, which sounds charming until you’ve spent an entire afternoon trying to get the shading right on a watercolor artichoke. There would be personality wallpaper in the bathroom, icy sparkling cocktails, very good roast chicken and a bread service so generous it would probably make an accountant nervous.

Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about razor-thin margins in a fantasy. But even if I did, I know one dish that would earn its place on the menu: cabbage.

Specifically, green cabbage roasted in miso butter, then showered with crispy, lemony panko breadcrumbs. It’s inexpensive, uncomplicated and just a little chic. More importantly, I can’t seem to stop making it.

The recipe began with one of my favorite ways to cook: playing matchmaker with ingredients. If Thing A already loves Thing B, and Thing B loves Thing C, perhaps A and C would get along, too. There’s a pleasing logic to it, like introducing two friends at a dinner party and watching them discover they have more in common than the host.

I already adored miso butter, with its salty, savory depth. And cabbage cooked in butter is a classic for good reason. Putting the two together was hardly a leap. I chopped up a head of green cabbage, coated it with the miso butter and let the oven do the rest. After about 30 minutes at 350 degrees, with a stir halfway through, the cabbage had softened into silky folds, with a little browning at the edges. The butter made it rich; the miso gave it a subtle funk.

It was very good. It also needed crunch.

My first instinct was to go the baked-macaroni-and-cheese route: lightly toast some panko, scatter it over the cabbage, then return the whole thing to the oven. In theory, a golden, crunchy topping. In practice, the crumbs more or less fused into a single crust over the slick cabbage beneath. Cutting through it was less delightful than I’d imagined.

The fix was blessedly simple. I crisped the breadcrumbs separately in a pan with olive oil, red pepper flakes and the zest of an entire lemon, then spooned them over the cabbage just before serving. Now each forkful caught a little of everything: tender, almost creamy cabbage; browned edges; bright flecks of citrus; and individual crunchy crumbs that stayed crunchy.

That last part matters. The contrast is what makes this feel like a dish rather than a vegetable dutifully placed beside dinner.

And beside dinner it has appeared, repeatedly. With salmon and rice. With grilled chicken and sweet potato coins glossed with maple syrup and orange zest. With a skillet of white beans and sausage, plus sourdough for scooping. Different meals, same cabbage. At this point, I’d be more surprised by a week without it.

Lately, I’ve been trying to make room for more vegetables in everyday cooking, ideally two kinds at dinner. Not as a grim exercise in virtue, but because I want the vegetables to be things I actually look forward to eating. That means finding a few sides that are so appealing, and so low-effort, that adding one more feels less like a chore and more like, “Oh, hell, why not?”

Cabbage is particularly good at this. It’s cheap, keeps beautifully in the refrigerator and demands almost no knife skills. You can even buy it pre-shredded. It sits in the oven while you make the rest of the meal, asking for little beyond a halfway stir. Low-maintenance, low-effort, high return.

I may never open that bistro, and perhaps that’s just as well for the accountant and the watercolor artichokes. But on an ordinary weeknight, when dinner is nearly done and I find myself reaching for the cabbage again, I get a small piece of the fantasy anyway: something simple enough to make at home, and good enough that I’d happily order it out.

 

 

The post I can’t stop making this cabbage appeared first on Salon.com.

I ate lamb ribs sticky with tamarind and dates, watched fairy tales transformed into extravagant burlesque, learned to make stained glass and watched people take shots of alcohol poured directly from the head of a bluefin tuna during my latest trip to New York City. It wasn’t exactly a conventional sightseeing itinerary, but that’s increasingly how I like to experience the city.

I used to live in New York, and no matter how many times I return, it never fails to surprise, delight, frustrate and invigorate me. I spent another week revisiting favorites and adding to the list of must-visit places I might never get to. The possibilities seem endless, particularly when you’re willing to follow your curiosity. From unforgettable meals to unexpected experiences, here’s where mine took me this time — and where I’d happily go again.

Lunch and cafes

One of my favorite things about eating in New York is how easily a casual lunch can become one of the most memorable meals of the trip. Take LAUT in Union Square, the first Malaysian restaurant in New York City to be awarded a Michelin star. While the establishment hasn’t retained it, if the bustling lunch crowd was any indication, it’s certainly a worthwhile stop. The menu draws from Singaporean, Thai and Malaysian cuisine, with fragrant curries, flaky roti, chewy noodles and wok-fried dishes.

We loved the fried butter garlic soft-shell crab with fragrant, crispy curry leaves. The roti canai was another standout, perfectly flaky and served with a spice-forward sauce you’ll want to eat with a spoon. Bone-in duck curry followed, braised in coconut milk with lime leaf and tomato, and served with rice. It had a stick-to-your-bones constitution, and you could easily get lost in the flavorful sauce.

Peruvian food is influenced by flavors from around the globe, with delicious peppers, lots of citrus and fresh ingredients as the stars of the show. At Mission Ceviche, also in Union Square, I found an excellent lunch menu offering a variety of ceviches — ceviche nikkei was my favorite! — and tiraditos, cravable mocktails and main dishes ranging from classics like lomo saltado to whole grilled branzino over a bright tomato chorrillana sauce. I could have easily downed several basil breeze mocktails.

Harlem is home to Red Rooster, co-founded by the acclaimed Marcus Samuelsson. Inspired by Black American, Southern and Caribbean cuisines, the restaurant serves as a gathering place with live music, good food and a lively atmosphere. The service was excellent despite the full restaurant and busy bar, and we ordered a variety of dishes for the three of us.

I loved fried chicken and this one was coated in a crispy shell while perfectly juicy inside, served with greens and unctuous mashed potatoes. Jerk wings were great, too, as well as the Uptown Guac, served with fried hushpuppies. Surprisingly, the highlight of our meal was dessert: a strawberry and mango salad with coconut sauce. So refreshing, and a perfect way to end the meal.

Of course, not every great food discovery requires a sit-down meal. Two small but mighty cafes in Greenwich Village made particularly memorable stops, each with a very different specialty.

Savory pastries meet halloumi from Cyprus at Hello Halloumi, a small bakery where the cheese is the star of the menu. Halloumi appears fried, baked into pastries, turned into grilled cheese, served as the meat in a “burger,” and featured in gyro wraps and bowls. The rose cloud matcha was delicious, and if you want something sweet, don’t miss the tahinopita, a cinnamon roll-style treat slathered in decadent tahini icing.

Nearby, Kawaii Cafe is a little Vietnamese coffee shop with a French bulldog named Latte as its mascot that should be a required stop for any coffee or matcha lover. Kim, the owner, came to the United States from Vietnam and worked as a nail tech. Kawaii’s signature beverages hearken back to those days, when she’d talk to clients and hear all about their relationship problems. Situationship, Thirst Trap and What Are We are all handcrafted drinks inspired by those conversations.

Coffee beans are carefully sourced from Vietnam, cream toppings and jellies are made in-house, and vibrant green matcha from Shizuoka, Japan, makes for unforgettable combinations. The matcha was so good I came back twice!

Leisurely dinners

For dinner, New York offers endless opportunities to get a little more adventurous. Some of my favorite dishes from this trip came from restaurants drawing on different culinary traditions and finding exciting ways to bring them together.

At Eyval in Bushwick, an Iranian restaurant that bills itself as “recreating traditional Iranian cooking for a contemporary audience,” the dining room was bustling and lively, with every table full when we arrived. The menu isn’t overly extensive, but every dish we ate balanced flavors, textures and ingredients superbly.

I could eat the citrus, date and cabbage salad every day and probably never get tired of it. The punchy, rich chile-tahini dressing balances perfectly with the sweet, chewy dates, bursts of orange and crunchy cabbage. Match made in heaven, really. Then there were fall-off-the-bone lamb ribs with a sticky tamarind-and-date sauce that you just have to lick your fingers after devouring, and a saffron half chicken, pressed and served over rice studded with barberries and pumpkin seeds. This restaurant will live rent-free in my brain for quite some time.

Marcus Samuelsson’s Hav & Mar offers another inventive approach to familiar ingredients. Born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden, Samuelsson draws on both culinary traditions at this seafood-focused restaurant. The space is beautiful and lively, with mermaids on the walls and a central bar. The menu is spice-forward, with raw and cured dishes, small plates and a range of entrees.

We loved the crudo trio: tuna tartare with miso and injera, hamachi with gooseberries and crispy onions, and berbere-cured salmon, lox-style, in an orange broth. The highlight of our meal was a whole crispy-skin branzino served with fresh injera, shiro and plenty of herbs, while dry-aged lamb chops rounded out our order. My only regret is skipping the Hav bread basket, with teff biscuits, blue cornbread and injera crisps.

New York can also deliver an exceptional steak dinner, whether you’re drawn to Brazilian specialties or an old-school white-tablecloth institution.

The dimly lit Berimbau Brazilian Table in Midtown, from restaurateur Mario de Matos, was a delight, with a relatively small menu of Brazilian specialties. We started with the nearly obligatory pão de queijo, crispy, cheesy, chewy bread that’s naturally gluten-free and positively scrumptious.

The star of the menu is clear immediately: tableside-carved prime picanha, a treat for the eyes and certainly the taste buds. The massive 38-ounce portion sits on a bed of corn farofa, a textural delight, and is served with cheesy yuca purée, charred vegetables and salada vinagrete that adds a much-needed acidic punch. It technically serves three but is perfect for two, with plenty of leftovers. This might have been the best picanha I’ve ever had. The service, ambiance and lighting make it an excellent choice for a memorable meal.

Gallagher’s Steakhouse, on the other hand, is where you go for an old-school New York experience, complete with waiters in bow ties, dry-aged steaks and classic sides. Originally a speakeasy that opened during Prohibition, it changed hands several times and became a New York City institution.

The menu offers classics: a raw bar with delicious oysters (ask for horseradish, they have it!), Caesar salad, French onion soup and other starters. Steaks of all kinds, some dry-aged in the meat lockers you walk past as you’re seated, can be topped with blue cheese or served with bone marrow. I’d skip the latter, even as a bone marrow lover.

We opted for a well-aged, medium-rare T-bone steak cooked over hickory logs, with buttered corn and spinach served family-style. In the classic Gallagher’s way, the waiter fills your plate. Endearing or disconcerting? You decide. Save room for the New York cheesecake. It’s made in-house and was a surprising standout.

And for a completely different kind of fine dining, there’s Sushi Akira, where chef-owner Nikki Zheng is right at home behind the counter.

Sushi Akira specializes in Edomae-style sushi, using curing, marinating and dry aging to bring out the best texture and flavor of each ingredient without relying on heavy sauces. Chef Zheng is generous with her time, answering questions and explaining techniques and ingredients as she creates an 18-course omakase. Each carefully crafted piece of nigiri changes depending on what’s in season, and the meal unfolds in a choreographed dance for just 16 lucky diners.

Get the sake pairing if you’re imbibing, even if you don’t usually think of yourself as a sake drinker. The selections brilliantly complemented and enhanced each course and introduced me to combinations I wouldn’t have expected.

For a lively dinner with a group, I loved MangoSeed in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. The playlist really set the mood. Billed as “Caribbean-inspired” and heavily influenced by Jamaican cuisine, the restaurant offers a fun atmosphere, hearty food and excellent service. My wife and I invited her mother, niece and nephew to join us, and despite the restaurant’s size, it fit our multigenerational group perfectly.

We really enjoyed the whole grilled fish with charred lemon and spicy jerk wings. Order a rum punch if you like a fruity drink that packs a punch, pun intended. A beloved favorite, the baked four-cheese mac and cheese was gooey and decadent. The rice and peas and oxtail didn’t quite live up to our high standards, but they rounded out the meal. And for dessert, the chocolate cake was moist and deeply chocolatey, a surprising standout for the entire group.

Getting around

Of course, getting to and around New York City can be stressful. Between traffic and the sheer number of people, it can overwhelm even seasoned travelers. A couple of transportation services made my recent visits easier.

Having a professional driver from Gotham Ride Chauffeur Service pick you up at the airport can help a trip start off right. The company tracks your flight so the driver can meet you even if it’s delayed, and you’re greeted with cold beverages while you take a load off.

I’ve used the service on two trips, and both were a breeze, even when one of my flights was turned around midair and another was canceled as we were about to get into the car. Those are precisely the moments when having some help with the logistics makes a difference.

For getting around town, I’ve also been testing alternatives to the usual rideshare options. I lived in New York during the golden age of rideshare, when it was largely budget-friendly and so many new apps were popping up that the competition was fierce. In the years since, Uber and Lyft have become the primary choices, but whenever I return, I try to test-drive newer options.

Empower isn’t exactly traditional rideshare. The company bills itself as a software platform, allowing drivers to set their own rates and keep 100% of the fare revenue while paying a daily or monthly fee to use the service.

On my visits, drivers were available quickly, rates were reliably lower than the Uber fares I was comparing against, and service was what you’d expect. I plan to use the app again the next time I’m in New York City.

Experiences worth booking

As much as I love eating my way through New York, every trip deserves a few experiences that don’t revolve entirely around a restaurant reservation. This time, that meant everything from burlesque and close-up magic to a four-hour stained-glass class and a very unusual encounter with a bluefin tuna.

For a night out with some genuine spectacle, Company XIV reimagines classic stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” as full-scale burlesque productions. Complete with live singing, expert choreography, ballet, aerial performances and costumes designed to be removed piece by piece, the shows are sensual and mesmerizing.

The theater is a magnificent setting for each performance, decked out in velvet and glitter, with chandeliers overhead. If you enjoy a really good performance art, you must catch a show at Théâtre XIV. Whether you’re with a lover or a group of friends, prepare to be dazzled!

(And if you’re peckish before or after the show, stop by Tortillería Mexicana Los Hermanos, just a three-minute walk away. The restaurant operates inside a tortilla factory that has been making tortillas in-house since 1998, and the food never disappoints. I always get the carnitas, perfectly crispy and deeply savory, served in fresh, warm tortillas.)

For another kind of performance, consider the tuna-cutting experience at Sushi by Bou. If your TikTok feed looks anything like mine, you’ve probably watched plenty of videos of live tuna cuttings. If omakase isn’t interactive or exciting enough for you, this is a chance to watch an entire bluefin tuna being carved, sliced and served in an endless parade of toro, akami and more.

Sushi by Bou curated a party-like atmosphere in a room full of eager sushi lovers. Libations flowing, delicious fatty tuna passed around, and alcohol poured directly into your mouth from the tuna head itself were some of the highlights. You can even scrape tuna directly off the ribs if you choose. It’s not exactly a typical sushi dinner, but that’s part of the fun.

For an experience that trades culinary spectacle for old-fashioned wonder, there’s Chamber Magic at the glitzy Lotte New York Palace.

Tune out everything and let yourself believe in magic — at least for an hour and 45 minutes. Magician Steve Cohen makes everyone feel like an important part of the show. Held on Friday and Saturday, with a cocktail-attire dress code, the performance brings together just 64 people to giggle, laugh and try to figure out how Cohen pours someone’s perfect cocktail from a teapot unprompted, among other magical acts. You’ll leave with a wide smile, enchanted by the experience.

Not all my favorite activities involve watching someone else demonstrate a skill, though. I love finding a creative experience while traveling, particularly when it means learning something new and bringing home a one-of-a-kind souvenir I made myself.

Craftsman Ave in Brooklyn offers classes for even the most adventurous crafter, including knife making, leatherwork, textiles and stained glass, which I chose. Its introduction to stained glass is a four-hour class that walks you through every step of making a wall hanging, from selecting your design to cutting the glass, soldering and finishing the piece.

My wife and I have taken many craft classes, but this one felt more advanced than anything we’d tried before, with experienced artists working alongside us. I definitely felt frustrated at times because it took me a while to grasp each step. But in the end, I was glad I took the class, even if my cat was more amateur than I’d hoped.

If you’re looking for a bite before or after class, stop by Sahadi’s at Industry City, just a few minutes away on foot. The longtime Lebanese grocer has been operating in New York since the late 1800s, and this location has a grab-and-go deli as well as seated lunch and dinner service.

Another New York experience worth considering is having something made specifically for you. Have you ever put on a suit and had it fit perfectly? Me neither! Nothing off the rack makes me feel like a million bucks.

That’s what makes Alan David Custom in Midtown such an interesting stop. The bespoke tailoring house crafts suits to your exact measurements and requirements, guiding you through the process from fabric selection to final fitting.

The fabric choices are endless, and every detail is dictated by you rather than a mass-market clothing producer: pocket or no pocket, type of stitching, exact fit, even the hemline for the style of shoes you actually wear. After the initial measurements, the company can ship a basted fitting and arrange a virtual fitting to finalize the details before sewing and sending the finished garment.

Whether you’re preparing for a big occasion or simply tired of wearing something that doesn’t quite fit, it’s a luxury experience that offers something more personal than an ordinary shopping trip.

Where to stay

After a full day of exploring, there’s something to be said for returning to a comfortable hotel, particularly one that feels a little different from the generic, nondescript rooms you can find almost anywhere.

The Kimberly Hotel has old-school charm and timeless elegance, with gracious, helpful service and a massive round fish tank in the lobby that you can get lost in. The hotel has 194 rooms, including one- and two-bedroom suites.

We stayed in a massive one-bedroom suite, even by regular standards, with a lounge area and kitchenette complete with a microwave and refrigerator that we put to good use. The bed was super comfortable, but the bathroom was tiny considering all the space. A balcony with Manhattan views was simply the pièce de résistance. Even if your room doesn’t have a balcony, you can get 360-degree views at the rooftop lounge, aptly called Upstairs at The Kimberly.

For a comfortable home base with minimal frills, Kimpton Ashbel New York Park Avenue fits the brief well.

The lobby is inspired by a living and dining room spread across two spaces, with the registration desk at the center. It’s designed to give you room to relax and connect, and it’s great for people-watching, although the hustle and bustle means it isn’t a place to go for peace and quiet.

Our room was surprisingly spacious for New York City, with a table, chairs and a jetted tub — which was quite difficult to climb into, if I’m honest. Kimpton Ashbel is also pet-friendly, with no deposit required and no weight, size or breed restrictions, a huge boon for travelers with pets.

My stained-glass cat didn’t turn out quite as I’d hoped, and there are still countless restaurants on my list I never managed to visit. But I came home with some excellent meals, a few wonderfully strange memories and plenty of reasons to return.

Elevate your taste buds

New York’s legal cannabis scene is flourishing, with countless dispensaries competing for your business. Each dispensary offers a different experience depending on your style and preferences.

Housing Works Cannabis Co. is both New York’s first legal recreational cannabis dispensary and one of a handful of nonprofit dispensaries. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Housing Works has been serving homeless and low-income New Yorkers, particularly people living with HIV, in a variety of capacities for years. The dispensary, just a short walk from Union Square and the Village, puts all of its profits toward supporting that mission.

Then there’s The Daily Green in Times Square, impossible to miss beneath digital green billboards with cannabis displayed in bold newspaper type. The massive dispensary has a selection to match, with products ranging from pre-rolls and tinctures to topicals and vapes, including New York brands like ayrloom and national ones including STIIIZY and Dogwalker.

An interactive bud bar lets customers get a firsthand look at different cannabis varieties, with a terpene guide providing additional information. It’s a distinctly different experience from visiting a small neighborhood shop, and an interesting example of how cannabis has become part of the Times Square retail landscape.

On the Upper West Side, Superfly Dispensary offers another approach. The budtenders are knowledgeable, cannabis varieties are available to examine under magnification, and the selection intentionally includes LGBT- and Black-owned brands. Superfly also serves as a community hub, with weekly yoga and Pilates, disco nights, Halloween parties and brand activations. There’s something for people looking to connect and spend time with like-minded neighbors, not simply shop. Great choices include ayrloom’s Lychee Dream pre-rolls, Good Tide guava gummies and Sluggers Lemon Cherry Gelato vape.

The post New York City, deliciously off-script appeared first on Salon.com.

Airbnb’s nonprofit held its inaugural gala on Wednesday in Los Angeles, and the internet had one reaction — the *what* gala? 

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The Danish government wants to ban a fast-growing breed known as “turbo chickens,” setting up another clash with the farm sector over animal welfare.

“We can see that there are widespread problems with the welfare of turbo chickens,” Danish Animal Welfare Minister Christian Rabjerg Madsen told news channel TV2 this week. “They simply grow too fast for their bodies to keep up.”

The move, which would be first in the world, is the latest in a series of new restrictions for the country’s farmers. The center-left coalition government, which rode to power on concerns about animal well-being in what was dubbed the “pig election” earlier this year, is now turning to poultry.

Madsen said he wants to ban the fast-growing chickens, known as the Ross 308 breed, at both the national and EU level. His announcement came just a day after a documentary aired with hidden-camera footage from a chicken farm. The footage showed chickens illegally getting just three hours of darkness a day to accelerate growth.

The Ross 308 breed, a widely used breed in poultry production, reaches a body weight of around 2 kilograms over just 33 days, but that can lead to injuries and trouble moving.

A broad group of parties appears to back the proposal. But questions over both the “legal and financial aspects” remain, Madsen acknowledged.

Chicken sector advocates warned that in practice, consumers would simply buy more meat from foreign farms, making it hard for Danish chicken farmers to compete. Poultry company Danpo told specialist outlet LandbrugsAvisen that it was prepared to move away from fast-growing breeds if the ban also covered imports.

But that could prove tricky on an EU level, where common rules of free movement of goods apply.

Denmark previously pushed Brussels to ban turbo chickens at the EU level in the past, and an earlier bid to ban them at the national level fizzled. Copenhagen’s new effort is likely to find an ally in The Hague. The Dutch government proposed a similar national-level ban in September, which the parliament is now considering.

The European Commission plans to announce new welfare rules for chickens later this year. While it has promised a ban on cages and the practice of killing day-old male chicks, it has not announced any bans on certain breeds.