If you haven't yet noticed, there is a war going on.

Some years ago, the last UK government decided to act on the rising tide of obesity by getting tough with the food companies, who were, according to the government, making us all fat with their processed foods. They called the representatives of the burger chains, the breakfast cereal manufacturers and the chocolate manufacturers in to have a very stiff word with them - change your ways or we will legislate - was the message.

And change they did.

In order to accommodate the new regime and to avoid the government forcing them to act and regulating, the major burger chains, McDonalds and Burger King, ceased the sale of super-sized meals (they weren't selling too well anyway so there was no real problem), the breakfast cereal manufacturers pledged to stop advertising sugary cereals on children's TV and the chocolate manufacturers promised to cut the size of their chocolate bars.

My rant today is about the chocolate bar people, as they are the ones I have evidence against - I'm sure I'll have a go at the others at a later date.

I'm not saying we shouldn't eat chocolate. I bought some today and this is how I got the idea for today's story. I bought some very excellent looking chocolate things as an emergency dessert for when I didn't have time to make anything better (see how easy it is?).

But there is a war going and the enemy are clever - don't expect them to play by the rules.

The chocolate manufacturers were in trouble because they had been steadily increasing the size of their bars over the years and they were now considered unhealthy. For instance, the King Sized Mars Bar weighed 84g and contained 540 calories (about 1/5 the whole required daily calorific intake for an active man in a four bite snack). Under pressure from the UK and other governments, Mars decided to limit the calorie count of their bars to a mere 250 - requiring the bar be effectively cut in half. Pretty soon, Mars stopped selling the king sized version entirely. Well done them.

Or did they?

Of course they still wanted to sell lots of chocolate, so cunningly introduced the Mars Duo, two smaller bars with a combined weight of 85g - slightly more than the King Size but now Mars were claiming these were for sharing and you weren't expected to eat both of them yourself. Note: This is the same argument crisp manufacturer's use to rationalise selling enormous packets of crisps.

So the government didn't legislate and Mars continued to sell giant bars of sugary stuff which were considered unhealthy by governments and medics.

Asymmetric warfare - the enemy isn't playing the same game as the governments and they are going to win.

And so to today's emergency dessert and why am I talking about chocolate manufactureres being sneaky?

Today we had something new: Cadbury's Egg and Spoon - four chocolate eggs, filled with chocolate mousse and wrapped in foil (195 calories each). The packaging is a marvel, quite the most magnificent piece of product design since Marcel Breuer invented the tubular steel chair. The package even contains little spoons so you can pretend you are eating a boiled egg and the mousse inside is the egg.

Spoons? How many spoons?

Two - only two, for four eggs.

But if the eggs are for sharing surely there should be 4 spoons, one egg per person, one spoon per egg. Surely at 195 calories per egg, Cadbury's aren't suggesting you eat two - that would be back to before the days of their little chat with the government.

Yes, only two spoons.

You might think I'm reading too much into this, but I can't imagine any company that has spent as much designing this product as Cadbury's has, hasn't considered every possibility, every psychological nuance of what they are selling.

Cadbury's are cheating here, squirming to get under the barbed wire fence - they have designed a product which cunningly gets around the agreed calorie limit for a single portion without anyone raising an eyebrow - except me of course but nobody reads this as it's buried deep in the bowels of the internet where no-one can find it.

Clever Cadbury's - I am not sure the Quakers who founded your company to make drinking chocolate to lure the drunken working classes away from booze, would have approved of your methods, but they are no longer in charge.

I will say in defence of the eggs, we had one each and they were really tasty. I could easily have eaten all 4.

Excellent article on Newsnight tonight about where meat for processed food comes from - it's on now so I can't put a link to it yet.