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Award-winning director Michael Moore, who was mentioned by accused UnitedHealthcare assassin Luigi Mangione in his alleged manifesto, has vowed to “pour gasoline” on the public anger against insurance companies in the wake of the killing.

Moore, who directed the 2007 film SICKO, reacted on his Substack to Mangione allegedly praising him in his manifesto for his examination of the state of the U.S. healthcare system in the film.

“It’s not often that my work gets a killer five-star review from an actual killer,” Moore quipped in the post Friday, noting that millions have watched the film “including, apparently, Luigi Mangione.”

In the post, titled “A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Insurance Companies,” Moore wrote that he’s received countless requests to comment on the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, whom Mangione allegedly targeted over his frustrations with the company. Luigi Mangione Went Dark in 2023. He Returned Transformed PAINFUL YEAR Harry Lambert A photo illustration of Luigi Mangione.

“Yes, I condemn murder, and that’s why I condemn America’s broken, vile, rapacious, bloodthirsty, unethical, immoral health care industry and I condemn every one of the CEOs who are in charge of it and I condemn every politician who takes their money and keeps this system going instead of tearing it up, ripping it apart, and throwing it all away,” Moore wrote.

He noted that the murder has stirred up a wave of “completely justified” anger at health insurance companies.

“It is not new. It has been boiling. And I’m not going to tamp it down or ask people to shut up. I want to pour gasoline on that anger,” Moore continued.

Mangione was arrested Monday in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in connection to the killing of Thompson, who was gunned down outside of a hotel in Manhattan as he walked to a conference.

The accused killer was taken into custody with several fake IDs, a U.S. passport, as well as writings about the insurance industry, including the alleged manifesto.

“Frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain,” Mangione wrote. Luigi Mangione’s Family Hired Private Eye After He Vanished MAN ON A MISSION Josh Fiallo HOLLIDAYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA - DECEMBER 10: Suspected shooter Luigi Mangione is led into the Blair County Courthouse for an extradition hearing December 10, 2024 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. Mangione has been arraigned on weapons and false identification charges related to the fatal shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City. Mangione is incarcerated in the State Correctional Institution in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania awaiting extradition to New York. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

In addition to Sicko, Moore is known for other documentaries like Bowling for Columbine, a film about America’s gun violence issue, and Fahrenheit 9/11, which showed the effects of 9/11 and the Bush administration’s response.

At the end of his post Friday, Moore announced that he uploaded Sicko for free on YouTube for all to watch.

“These insurance corporations and their executives have more blood on their hands than a thousand 9/11 terrorists. And that’s why they are scrubbing their executives’ profiles from their websites and putting up fences around their headquarters,” Moore said. “Because they know what they have done.”

How did you go bankrupt?” one of the characters in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises asks another. The answer: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

As his enemies were advancing toward the gates of Damascus, Bashar Assad, the now-deposed butcher of Syria, must have called his buddy Vladimir Putin, asking for reinforcements. A decade ago, Putin had provided massive military might to keep Assad in power during the Syrian civil war. But this time, one can surmise, Putin essentially answered his plea, “Nyet.”

The Russian strongman may well have asked, “How did you go bankrupt?” Assad’s response, in effect, amounted to, “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Putin has to be fearful that in time he, too, might go bust. Now that Russian trade with the West is basically closed off, Putin has become indebted to China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Inflation is roaring in Russia. And much of the nation’s fighting force lies dead on the Ukrainian battlefield. Nonetheless, a diminished Putin is still dangerous. He has shown that he won’t go quietly. And he has turned to a quiet form of dark-ops engagement with his enemies in Europe and the United States.

It’s the fight of the weak against a stronger adversary, deploying secret criminal and psychological warfare, and carrying out a dangerous and sometimes bloody game. And it’s escalating fast. Americans need to be on alert because at any time that game could spark a real shooting war. And when superpowers are involved, tanks and bombs can quickly turn into submarines and missiles.

Right now, the dogs of war look an awful lot like vandalism and petty (and not so petty) crimes. In the past few months alone, incidents linked to Russian sabotage have included smashing the Estonian interior minister’s car windows; breaching Finnish water treatment plants; setting fires in military-related facilities, Warsaw’s largest shopping mall, and historic structures around Poland; causing the crash of a DHL cargo plane in Lithuania, killing a crew member and injuring others; attempting to assassinate the CEO of one of Germany’s leading weapons makers; undermining anti-Russian factions in neighboring Georgia; plus conducting countless cyber hacks and purported attempts at online election interference in Europe and the United States. Not to mention the allegedly deliberate severing of vital undersea communications cables in the Baltic Sea by a Chinese vessel—possibly, in the view of Western officials, on orders from Russia. (An official Kremlin spokesperson characterized these last claims to The Wall Street Journal as “absurd, unsubstantiated accusations.” Russian officials have denied the country’s involvement in sabotage and vandalism.)

The list of suspicious attacks goes on and on. But often tracing them back to Moscow is impossible, or nearly so.

“This year there were 500 suspicious incidents in Europe,” Czech foreign minister Jan Lipavský told reporters ahead of a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels last week. “Up to 100 of them can be attributed to Russian hybrid attacks, espionage, influence operations.” Almost certainly, according to various sources, Russian-affiliated spies, vandals, arsonists, saboteurs, hackers, and assassins are behind many of the others. And yet there’s uncertainty in each instance about how deeply the Kremlin’s involvement goes. That’s part of the game.

The Insider, a Russia-focused, independent media outlet, reports confidently that European-based “acts of Russian state terrorism are now growing in tempo, scale and ambition…. Culprits tied to these operations have been arrested in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, Czechia, and the Baltic Sea region. Their targets for arson or bombing attacks include industrial sites, defense plants, shopping malls, bus depots, and museums.”

But lacking concrete evidence of Moscow’s role in the plots, certain European nations have been reluctant to call out the Russians. “We are simply being too polite,” Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen lamented in a conversation with the Council on Foreign Relations in July. “They are attacking us every day now.”

European governments and NATO observers are on edge, and despite Moscow’s denials, some leaders have started to lay blame at Putin’s doorstep. America, meanwhile, has been spared from illicit Russian physical attacks—for now. That’s not to say that one day an operation might go awry, killing not one or two people, but leading to casualties on a scale that could provoke armed conflict (see seasons one and two of the Netflix series The Diplomat), in which the US government might be drawn into the fighting. The Gray Zone and the Shadow War

Part of the problem for European authorities is that these attacks are occurring in what is known as the gray zone; they are low-level, small-scale strikes, sometimes carried out by agents who might not even know they are acting on Moscow’s behalf. The relatively minor damage from the incidents and the uncertainty surrounding their perpetrators often leave governments confused and hesitant to finger Moscow for these low-impact, high-density incursions on their territory.

Such shadowy assaults are not new. They are, in fact, part of Moscow’s war against the West that goes back well before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia knows it doesn’t have the firepower or the economic clout to win a hot war with NATO. So, analysts contend, it is pursuing the smaller-guy stance: Toss a drink in the face of the big-guy opponent at the bar, kick him where it hurts, disorient him, and leave him uncertain and unwilling to go on.

German air force colonel Sönke Marahrens is an expert on asymmetrical, hybrid warfare, as this strategy is called, and a senior nonresident fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. He emphasizes that he is not speaking on behalf of his government when he tells me that “sabotage is in the Russian tool set for what they call reflexive control”—a form of psychology that aims to intimidate, bewilder, and distract its adversaries. “These events create psychological effects, which are (or can be) amplified in the modern social media environment.” In other words, the frequency and variety of small attacks can be leveraged to knock countries and citizens back on their heels, leaving them unbalanced. Putin wants to show, Marahrens says, “that security is not a given” due to “the psychological side effects on the targeted society.”

The explicit choice to pursue gray zone warfare traces back, in part, to a 2013 article by Russian chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov. The general still sits atop the Russian army. In his essay, he laid out a blueprint for waging permanent conflict with the West, one in which Russia engages in “whole-of-government warfare that transcends boundaries between peace and wartime, best described as a fusion of various elements of soft and hard power across various domains,ˮ as summarized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The strategy later became known as the Gerasimov doctrine, and it detailed how Russia could pursue hostilities below the threshold of open warfare, in the gray zone. Examples may include anything from using troll farms as a way of influencing Americans’ electoral choices to allegedly sending operatives to map out America’s telecommunications grid.

Shadow wars fought below the threshold of open warfare are nothing new. The US, in advance of World War II, actually waged such war. I wrote a book, 1941: Fighting the Shadow War, that discussed America’s gray zone war against Nazi Germany prior to Pearl Harbor. Although Adolf Hitler’s forces had overrun and occupied most of the formerly independent nations of Europe, the American public was not ready for US troops to enter the war. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to assist the British—the last holdout left fighting Hitler—approved a secretive campaign against German business, shipping, and mineral interests in South America; illegally siphoned military supplies to Great Britain, in violation of the Neutrality Act, established in the 1930s; and broadcast alerts to the Royal Navy about lurking German U-boats. This shadow war eventually infuriated Hitler to the point that he, and not the United States, initiated a formal declaration of war.

Putin, despite all of his threats about potential nuclear options, clearly does not want a major shooting war with Europe and North America. Such a conflict would devastate the world, and Russia would certainly lose, even with the backing of China. But short of open war, Putin apparently wants Europeans to feel the sting and disorientation of war, to fear Russian power, and above all, to back off from their support of Ukraine.

This gray zone posture leaves European nations with few tools to answer Russian attacks beyond making arrests, exiling spies, and closing borders. The attacks and the threat of worse to come have also prompted another tool: emergency preparedness announcements to the public. In November, Sweden’s government dispensed copies of In Case of Crisis or War, 30-plus pages of advice about sheltering in an attack, first aid for the injured, communications without access to electronic devices, and psychological defenses. The Swedish government warned, “There are other ways, besides armed conflict, to influence and undermine our society; for example, cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, terrorism, and sabotage. These types of attacks may occur at any time. Some are happening here and now.” Neighboring Finland, Norway, and Denmark have recently published their own versions, with Finland’s offering advice on “preparing for incidents and crises.”

Entirely stopping Russia’s scattershot attacks is next to impossible. Moscow has managed to continue its gray zone warfare despite European nations’ control of their borders and the expulsion of many Russian diplomats and others. Moreover, the Russian military’s foreign intelligence agency, known as the GRU, has reportedly resorted to farming out its dirty work by hiring petty criminals to carry out attacks. In fact, according to The Insider, some of these vandals and saboteurs never even know they are paid by Russian plants in their homelands. They simply sign up for an easy payday to smash windows, light a fire, or graffiti a monument. “The criminal underworld is fertile ground for finding such people,” Latvian state police chief Armands Ruks recently observed. “If they have the inner conviction to commit crimes, they make good candidates.”

In any case, Putin keeps a large moat between GRU headquarters and its clandestine minions scattered across Europe. After each incident, Moscow denies any ties to the suspects, even those arrested with incontestable evidence of ties to the Kremlin. Marahrens says that when attacks occur, “There is no 100% certainty, and even if you think you can reach 100%, a Russian Secret Service officer explained…that he was taught that even when you get caught with a smoking gun in your hand, throw it away and tell them it’s not yours. Someone will believe you. It’s all about ambiguity.”

So why should the United States be concerned about this shady amalgam of thugs and small-time criminal operators? Article 5.

Article 5 is the mutual defense provision of NATO’s originating treaty. It was signed during the Cold War when the possibility of the old Soviet Union sending tanks into Western Europe seemed very real. Article 5 states that an attack against one member of the Western military alliance “shall be considered an attack against them all.” It is a call to arms for each and every ally. In NATO’s 75-year history, Article 5 has been invoked only once: immediately following the 9/11 attacks, when NATO forces were mobilized in support of the US and the allied incursion into Afghanistan.

But what if, say, some GRU-inspired plotter gets his hands on sarin gas or a high explosive and carries out an attack resulting in mass casualties? Does it amount to an Article 5–level attack on a NATO member nation? Even the NATO-phobic Donald Trump might feel he must act according to the treaty’s obligations.

For now, it appears that Putin (a former KGB officer himself) and his spy masters are playing a game of chicken. “Russia is testing the limits of Article 5 to stir up uncertainty,” Roderich Kiesewetter, a German lawmaker and former general staff officer of the German military, told Politico earlier this year. Nobody knows where the limits of gray zone warfare lie. And tracing the culpability of bad actors back to Moscow can take weeks and even months of forensics, intelligence, and police work. In the meantime, Putin can plausibly or not-so-plausibly deny and deny and deny.

That said, European governments are beginning to attribute acts of sabotage to Russia, even when some ambiguity remains. Estonian defense minister Hanno Pevkur, speaking to Politico, urged, “When something happens, just go public. Go show that these guys were hired from Russian services, and these guys conducted these attacks, getting the money from Russia.”

European security services have bolstered their collaborative efforts to identify and halt Moscow’s agents, according to multiple news reports. A few days ago, for instance, authorities announced that an Estonian citizen had been convicted of recruiting people to smash the Estonian minister’s car windows and deface World War II monuments. He was reportedly nabbed shortly before hightailing it out of the country. In the spring, an Estonian court tried and convicted him, along with six others, as part of a group of 11 alleged conspirators—two of whom are believed to be in Russia. The prosecutors did not say how many of the guilty, if any, were GRU agents. (Suspected saboteurs with ties to Moscow, who allegedly targeted an Ikea in Lithuania, have been detained in Poland. Nine alleged Russian operatives were connected to sabotage plans in the Baltics and, possibly, Sweden, the Polish prime minister said.)

These few arrests, of course, are unlikely to cause Putin to pull back his secret dogs of war. That will only occur when the price for such forays rises significantly—when the West strikes back in some fashion, and with force. Otherwise, Putin and his teams will keep on, unless, of course, the political situation becomes unstable in the Russian homeland.

Once that occurs, his own bankruptcy may come. Gradually, then suddenly.

More than a decade after the advent of the 3D-printed gun as an icon of libertarianism and a gun control nightmare, police say one of those homemade plastic weapons has now been found in the hands of perhaps the world’s most high-profile alleged killer. For the community of DIY gunsmiths who have spent years honing those printable firearms models, in fact, the handgun police claim Luigi Mangione used to fatally shoot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson is as recognizable as the now-famous alleged shooter himself—and shows just how practical and lethal those weapons have become.

In the 24 hours since police released a photo of what they say is Mangione’s gun following the 26-year-old’s arrest Monday, the online community devoted to 3D-printed firearms has been quick to identify the suspected murder weapon as a particular model of printable “ghost gun”—a homemade weapon with no serial number, created by assembling a mix of commercial and DIY parts. The gun appears to be a Chairmanwon V1, a tweak of a popular partially 3D-printed glock design known as the FMDA 19.2—an acronym that stands for the libertarian slogan, “Free Men Don’t Ask.”

The FMDA 19.2, released in 2021, is a relatively old model by 3D-printed gun standards, says one gunsmith who goes by the first name John and the online handle Mr. Snow Makes. But it’s one of the most well-known and well-tested printable ghost gun designs, he says. The Chairmanwon V1 remix that police say Mangione had in his possession when he was arrested in a Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonald’s varies from that original FMDA 19.2 design only in that another amateur gunsmith, who goes by the pseudonym Chairmanwon, added a different texture to the gun’s grip.

“For someone who has been building firearms like this for five years, it’s a bit of an odd choice. We’ve been building nicer models,” says Mr. Snow Makes, who hosts an annual ghost gun shooting competition. But he adds that “this is one of the earliest 3D print glock styles that was widely tested and successful at creating a reliably functional firearm.”

Authorities in New York charged Mangione on Monday in the December 4 murder of Thompson, alongside weapons charges and other alleged offenses in Pennsylvania. A handwritten “manifesto” police say they found on Mangione's person upon his arrest laments United Healthcare's practices and the US health insurance industry more broadly. Bullet casings discovered at the scene of the shooting outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel in Manhattan were reportedly emblazoned with the words “deny,” “defend,” “depose”—likely criticisms of health care industry practices.

The fact that even a relatively old model of 3D-printed firearm allegedly allowed Mangione to shoot Thompson repeatedly on a Manhattan street—certainly the most high-profile shooting ever committed with a ghost gun or a 3D-printed weapon—shows how far DIY weapons tech has come, says Cody Wilson, the founder of the gun rights group Defense Distributed. Unlike the earliest 3D-printed gun models, the FDMA 19.2 can be fired hundreds or even thousands of times without its plastic components breaking.

“It just speaks to the ease with which you can do this,” says Wilson. “He doesn’t have to be an expert at 3D-printed guns or shooting, and it all works.”

Despite its simple description by law enforcement and others as a “3D-printed pistol,” the FMDA 19.2 is only partially 3D printed. That makes it fundamentally different from fully 3D-printed guns like the “Liberator,” the original one-shot, 3D-printed pistol Wilson debuted in 2013.

Instead, firearms built from designs like the FMDA 19.2 are assembled from a combination of commercially produced parts like barrels, slides, and magazines—sometimes sold in kits—and a homemade frame. Because that frame—often referred to as a “lower receiver” or “lower”—is the regulated body of the gun, 3D printing that piece or otherwise creating it at home allows DIY gunmakers to skirt gun-control laws and build so-called ghost guns with no serial number, obtained with no background check or waiting period.

The FMDA 19.2 model, released by a group originally known as Deterrence Dispensed—a gun-building group initially inspired by Wilson’s Defense Distributed but now widely seen as a rival—was distinguished by its use of commercially available “rails,” the metal components that guide the upper part of the gun known as its slide, which retracts with every shot, resetting the trigger and loading a new round into the chamber. (In a widely circulated video of Thompson's murder, the gun allegedly fired by Mangione appears not to have functioned as a semi-automatic. That's a result of the suppressor attachment preventing its re-chambering mechanism, gunsmiths say.)

The FDMA 19.2's relatively simple tweak—the use of commercially produced metal rails instead of homemade ones—led the gun model to be considered the most practical and reliable 3D-printed glock design available at the time it was released three years ago. “There had been earlier glock-style pistols, but the interior rail components were not as refined,” says Mr. Snow Makes. “It’s kind of that perfect blend of 3D-printed frame and precision rails.”

Deterrence Dispensed, the group behind that FMDA 19.2 design, has since rebranded under the name “the Gatalog.” But the group’s original website still bears the libertarian gun rights slogans that summarize its ideology. “All individuals are entitled to the utility to defend their humanity,” the site reads. “Gun control has failed. You can’t stop the signal.”

A founder of Deterrence Dispensed who went by the named Jstark, later revealed to be a now-deceased German man named Jakob Duygu, was featured in a in a Popular Front documentary wearing a black balaclava and sunglasses. “We want people to have freedom of speech and the right to bear arms," he says in the film. “If that’s too politically extreme for you, fuck yourself.”

Just two months ago, one Bergen, New York man who allegedly acted as an administrator for the Gatalog named Peter Celentano was arrested and charged with illegal ownership of two machine guns and numerous 3D-printed and other homemade handgun and AR-15 components.

Exactly why Mangione allegedly used a 3D-printed gun in the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s Thompson—whether as a political statement or in the belief that it would help him evade identification—remains far from clear. But as a coder and technologist, he may have been attracted to the idea. “This is the US. It’s not the easiest way to get your hands on a gun,” says another DIY gunsmith who spoke to WIRED but asked not to be named, in reference to 3D-printed firearms. “But he’s a techy guy, and he may have just owned a 3D printer. It wouldn’t be a bad way to make an untraceable gun.”

Who gets to be a saint is not just about holiness; it is about identity, politics, economics and geography.

Behind the sweet exterior of chocolatiering is a sector facing serious headaches. Cocoa prices reached record highs in the 2023/2024 season, as difficult weather conditions and the rapid spread of black pod disease caused huge yield reductions in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana—the two biggest cocoa-supplying countries. Estimations published by the International Cocoa Organization expect the global sector to see a 14.2 percent reduction in yield this season because of it.

This 14.2 percent reduction translates to a shortage of around 462,000 tonnes and the lowest cocoa stocks in 22 years. It could mean a future characterized by even higher prices, topping the highs of almost $12,000/tonne, seen in the first half of 2024. Cocoa farming is already a tricky trade. Without action from the big producers, it might become impossible.

Thankfully a team at ETH Zurich think they have found a solution.

Traditional chocolate recipes combine fermented cocoa beans with refined sugar—usually made from sugar beets—to create the confectionary’s characteristic rich, sweet flavor. However, the Swiss team, led by emeritus ETH professor Erich Windhab, looked beyond the bean to see what might be possible when you consider the much larger cocoa pod as a whole. Photograph: Gustavo Ramirez/ Getty Images

“Surrounding the beans is the pulp, which yields a very sweet juice, and the endocarp, which yields fibrous powder that can turn that juice into a gel,” explains Kim Mishra, main author of the Nature Food study. “That sweetening gel is then used in place of refined sugar from sugar beets, and you have a new chocolate.”

Mishra makes it sound simple, but it was a difficult process to perfect, requiring almost three years of work alongside the dedicated research that formed three masters’ theses. Too much of the sweetened gel and the chocolate would clump; too little and the product lacked taste.

Collaborating with efforts to perfect the process was sustainable cocoa producer Koa. “Taste is king,” says Anian Schreiber, Koa’s founder and managing director. “When something tastes good, you naturally want to share it with everyone and their grandmother.”

Researchers working on cocoa-fruit chocolate in a development lab at Felchlin – pictured during the Covid pandemic. Photograph: Kim Mishra

He’s right, too: a growing body of evidence suggests that consumers ultimately care more about taste than ethics, despite what they might want to believe. “If a product is too expensive or doesn’t deliver on flavor, then it doesn’t matter what other claims it has, ” explains Sukanya Nag, a food technologist and an innovation and strategy consultant at FutureBridge. “All the drivers to eat chocolate are the same as they have always been: personal rewards, treats and celebrations—big and small. As a result, storytelling and cocoa sourcing do play a role, but mostly due to their impact on the taste.”

So, does the new product pass the taste test? Mishra thinks so, explaining that although the flavor is different, it is still appealing: “There will definitely be a change in taste. The chocolate has the same melt, the same visuals and the same snap, but it has a different sweetness sensation. It has notes of dried fruit, and more acidity from the juice.”

Crucially, Mishra hopes that by using the entire cocoa pod, the sustainability of chocolate production will go hand in hand with a reduction in price for the first time.

This starts with driving supply through farmer revenue. If producers are looking to buy more of the cocoa pod, farmers have access to diversified income streams, bankrolling expansion prospects and attracting more farmers to a trade marred by poverty.

Then there’s the product itself. Chocolate made only using the cocoa pod could be considered 100 percent cocoa, meaning that high-percentage products could be produced with less beans, offering the sector a safety net in the face of shortages.

Mishra’s team may have competition however, as chocolate’s challenges have spurred a broader period of innovation.

Opting for an entirely opposite solution, California-based Voyage Foods has developed a chocolate entirely without cocoa, made from RSPO-certified palm and shea kernel oils, sunflower seed protein and grape seeds.

Cocoa-free chocolate might sound counterintuitive, but it seems to have found some success, and the company recently shared plans to open a 284,000 square-foot facility in Ohio. The announcement followed a deal with US food supplier Cargill in April, which saw Voyage become the company’s exclusive B2B global distributor for their nut-free spreads and cocoa-free chocolate.

This illustration shows how ETH Zurich utilize the entire cocoa fruit, compared with traditional methods. Illustration: Kim Mishra

Elsewhere, Mars is looking to get to the literal root of the problem by improving the resilience of the all-important cocoa plant. The food giant is working with the USDA and UC Davis to genome sequence pathogens for the diseases wreaking havoc on crop yields, including black pod disease. It hopes that by understanding the problems on a microscopic level, it can select resilient cacao trees and bypass the sector’s supply headaches altogether.

Nag points to other areas of development, which focus on improving the quality of new solutions. In particular, she suggests that pascalization may hold promise.

“Pascalization [also referred to as high-pressure processing—HPP] involves applying high levels of hydrostatic pressure to cocoa products to stabilize cocoa particles and prevent the separation of cocoa powder,” she explains.

“This technique preserves flavors and nutrients, extends shelf life, modifies texture, and ensures food safety in cocoa and chocolate products without relying on heat or chemical preservatives. While this method is still under research, it shows promise for enhancing the texture of chocolate products, particularly in alternative formulations.”

Regardless of the growing competition, Mishra is confident in the full pod potential. However, his team isn’t the first to consider it, and both Nestle and Lindt & Sprüngli have made tentative inroads into similar markets, with varying degrees of success.

After launching its all-cocoa product Incoa in 2019, Nestlé quietly retracted it from the market in 2023 after it received a disappointing reception from a select few European markets. The chocolate did not use the endocarp, and skipped the gel-making stage, but had promised similar positive outcomes for farmers. Elsewhere, Lindt & Sprüngli apparently found more appetite following the launch of its Cocoa Pure product in 2021; it continues to offer the limited edition 100 percent cocoa bar, also in partnership with Koa—but also only using the pulp.

The industry spirit appears to be open to new ideas, then, but would the public embrace this new chocolate, and will ETH Zurich’s unique chocolate-making method ever make it out of the lab?

“If I didn’t have a daytime job, I would probably start a company,” says Mishra. “But the true milestone for implementation that has to be achieved is for a chocolate company to take the risk of prototyping a product—an actual product, not a product done by scientists. We scientists are really bad at making culinary delights, typically. I think as soon as a bigger chocolate manufacturer deems it a worthy path to go down, change will begin.”

Crypto investor Justin Sun bought a duct-taped banana for $6.2 million in a Sotheby's auction.
Sun ate the banana at a news conference where he compared the conceptual artwork to NFTs.
Guests were given bananas and duct tape to recreate the pricey artwork at home.

One week after paying $6.2 million for a duct-taped banana, crypto investor Justin Sun ate the pricey snack at a news conference in Hong Kong.

"The real value is the concept itself," he said.

Sun beat six other bidders at a Sotheby's auction in New York on November 20 to buy the conceptual artwork "Comedian." Italian visual artist Maurizio Cattelan first introduced it at the Art Basel Fair Miami in 2019.

The banana displayed at Sotheby's was purchased for 35 cents from a New York City fruit vendor. Sun has offered to buy 100,000 more bananas from the original vendor. He ate a replacement banana purchased in Hong Kong at the event.

"To be honest, for a banana with such a back story, the taste is naturally different from an ordinary one. I could discern a hint of what Big Mike bananas from 100 years ago might have tasted like," Sun later wrote on X, referring to the commercially extinct Gros Michel banana variety.

At the event hosted at the Peninsula Hotel, attendees were given bananas and duct tape to replicate the experience at home.

It is customary for the banana to be replaced. Sun's purchase includes a guide for installing the art, a right to display it, and a certificate of authenticity. Two previous versions were eaten in 2019 and 2023 by performance artist David Datuna and a South Korean university student, respectively.

Sun compared "Comedian" to digital assets such as NFTs.

"This conceptual artwork can be assembled and disassembled anywhere and at any time conveniently and in any place in the world," he said. "This is kind of a demonstration of decentralization."

Sun also made headlines earlier this week after announcing that his cryptocurrency platform Tron is investing $30 million in President-elect Donald Trump's crypto project, World Liberty Financial.