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Cheesemaking: Leveraging tradition for the future

Cheese is deeply rooted in Swiss culture, built on generations of knowledge about fermentation, cultures, ripening and craftsmanship. Now a Swiss creamery explores how cheesemaking can evolve into the future – while preserving the craft, know-how and traditions that make Swiss cheese so special. Building on this inherited knowledge, they developed a Swiss hard cheese made from locally grown lupins following a process like traditional cheesemaking: making (lupin) milk, fermenting it with cheese cultures, forming the wheels, smearing the rind and leaving them to ripen for months, monitoring, tasting and adjusting along the way. This requires patience, precision and the same cheesemaking skills that have been developed over generations. The main thing that is changed is the raw material: instead of animal milk from Swiss cows, the creamery uses plant milk made from lupins grown by Swiss farmers. According to their crowdfunding pitch to scale up from experimental wheels to a product the...
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Am I or AI? – A useful tool in (scientific) writing

A new article on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific writing caught my attention. It’s lurid headline says that a “Staggering 90% of biomedical papers now show signs of AI help”, suggesting widespread cheating by authors who let large language models (LLMs) do their work. However, in the article itself it then says that “LLM use was more frequent in abstracts, introductions and discussion sections than in methods and results sections”. This means AI was used to help with more general sections, less with the ones that contained the actual added-value of the papers and the original work of the authors – what was novel about the papers was written more often by the authors than what was known already (which was added with the help of AI). In my view, this makes a crucial difference.  What is even more important, IMHO, is that the article concedes: “One problem with current AI-detection methods is that they can’t distinguish between a text generated by AI and one t...
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I was in hospital, again, for the 10th time or so within the past year – two reasons why I post about it

This is something I had posted on LinkedIn , but as there it’s not publicly accessible (and I cannot share it e.g. on Bluesky ), I reposted it here.    Last week I was in hospital, again, for the  10 th time or so within the past year (whether for emergency room admissions or routine hospitalisations due to  my cancer ). But why do I post about it now? For two reasons. Because, overall, the staff are amazing – whether support staff or medical staff, trainees or senior physicians, front-line staff or those behind the scenes! They are so friendly, helpful and understanding, it’s really impressive. (And to be honest, I’m probably not the easiest pa tient.) I’m just very grateful for these people.    So on the one hand, this is a shout-out to these wonderful professionals! During COVID they were clapped as heroes, but then forgotten. And yet, here they are, still continuing to do good, day-in and day-out. But on the other hand, this i...
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Whether “ultra-processed” food is bad for your health depends on what food it is!

(I migrated this post from Tumblr, where I had posted in on 29 June 2025; here it was last updated on 12 Nov. 2026.) As the argument “ultra-processed” comes up over and again to malign certain food groups (like plant-based alternatives), I thought compiling a short overview might be in order. (See list of studies with  relevant quotes and links below.)  In classification systems like “NOVA”, the category of “ultra-processed” food (UPF) is ill defined and it lumps together a hotch-potch of different foodstuffs, some of which can be bad for your health, some are neutral, and some may even be beneficial. Whether one should be concerned about eating a “UPF” very much depends on which kind of food it is. (It’s bad if it’s made of meat or relates to sweetened beverages.) Generally, judging an outcome based on the process it was made with is not a very rigorous approach: Forging iron is not bad because it can be used to make swords. After all, it can also be used to make plough shar...
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