Is that an Alber Elbaz pink-bubblegum macaron you're eating? Ermahgerd! You are so last year. Lanvin in 2013? Please… this year it's all about Reed Krakoff's matte-black confections. Well, it was at New York Fashion Week, anyway. Come on, keep up!

Danone, the company behind Activia yogurts and Evian water, today revealed plans to cut 900 jobs across Europe. 

The murder highway that turns off into the French provinces

We've all been there. You're on holiday, it's lunchtime, you've found your restaurant and you are prepped to order that local speciality that everyone in the office has been banging on about since they made their own pilgrimage. But wait. A problem: how exactly do you say the word "potjevleesch"? Most of us, it seems, would pronounce it thus: "I'll have the steak frites."

The immaculate confection

My earliest food memory… Cooking with my mother and grandmother. My mother taught me how to do classic things such as make an apple tart, while my grandmother would cook a big meal every Sunday for 10 or 15 people, which I would help with. They had a lot of animals, and they would often kill a chicken or rabbit and cook that. But my favourite childhood dish was yoghurt cake. It was incredibly simple, but that's what you appreciate when you're young.

The French are sensitive about their favourite dishes, as the fierce response to California's ban on the sale of foie gras has illustrated.

French fear other states in US and EU will copy law brought in after animal rights campaign

Aggrieved diplomats in Paris to raise issue with US ambassador

Fitness First avoids gym sale

Danone issues profits warning

Food icons from around the world

A few of the lovely people we nowadays call trolls took exception to my column on Tuesday, in which I reported the despair felt by Greek people at the austerity being inflicted on them by bigger, richer countries in Western Europe. In saying Athenians want their economic sovereignty returned from Paris and Berlin, I was apparently being Eurosceptic. It's long overdue we interrogated that now-cliched term.

It is difficult to imagine these days, but, not very long ago, people would deposit litter on the streets without care or reproach, dog mess would be left on the pavement, and smokers would strike up without any consideration for their fellow citizens.