Satire spills from every page of Catch-22, with absurdity blown up to epic proportions. But the follies of Joseph Heller’s fiction are alarmingly analogous to those in Europe today.

Take Milo Minderbender, the enterprising mess officer whose ingenious syndicate serves soldiers the finest delicacies of the Mediterranean. The venture runs aground when Milo miscalculates on a purchase of Egyptian cotton – ending up with an enormous dead stock which he tries vainly to feed to servicemen. In desperation he coats the soft fibres in chocolate, but to no avail. Milo’s most curious confection proves inedible.

Swap cotton for insects, and the syndicate for their industry lobby, and we have a modern allegory for this ill-fated endeavour.

“Alternative proteins” have in recent years come to represent a new frontier in food production, with industry pioneers clamouring for investment – including subsidies – to scale up these initiatives. The gold rush has turned some laboratories into lucrative businesses, as consumers develop a taste for cultivated meats.

Other schemes have been less successful, some spectacularly so. Enter Ÿnsect, a French start-up with designs to dominate the insect protein market. The company collapsed last year amid stomach-turning revelations of festering facilities.

Rather than read the episode as a cautionary tale that Europeans don’t want to dine on bugs, the insect lobby has instead complained that the policy environment fails to match the industry’s ambition. To help bring this innovative cuisine into the mainstream, it has called for mandatory public procurement. Heller would have been proud.

If the French can’t sell insect gastronomy, Brussels doesn’t stand a chance. France has made hors d’oeuvres from slimy gastropods and amphibians, offal and gizzards are swallowed with relish. But the popular appetite for insects has proven non-existent, not for lack of culinary wizardry or public funds.

The truth is that no mind-bending marketing will convince consumers to sup on such base creatures – which instead are fed to less discerning livestock. It’s an elaborate substitute for animal feed that makes no economic sense.

In Catch-22, Milo saves his business empire by selling his useless cotton to the government. The saga makes great fiction, but satire is supposed to prevent such idiocy in the real world.

Building a bigger budget – The Commission’s plan to raise €406 billion through new EU-wide levies to fund the next €2 trillion seven-year budget is more political horse-trading than a way to reach EU-level goals. “The most crucial question that the Council will need to answer in the next year is how to finance [the budget],” said one EU diplomat.

Selling Mercosur to MEPs – The Commission is planning to informally involve MEPs in the provisional application of the Mercosur agreement, which could take place in the coming weeks. It’s a sensitive move, given that parliamentarians effectively rejected the deal two weeks ago.

Breaking Europe’s fossil fuel mindset – The electricity grid is fast becoming the backbone of Europe’s economy, climate strategy and security architecture. But without major, sustained investment in the grid, renewables cannot scale, electrification will stall and vulnerabilities will grow.

Ukraine energy grid on brink of collapse – Ukraine’s grid is increasingly fragile after heavy Russian bombing. Ukraine says Russia fired “more than 6,000 attack drones, around 5,500 guided aerial bombs, and 158 missiles of various types” at infrastructure in January alone.

Key takeaways from France’s new budget – French lawmakers have finally cleared the way for the adoption of the 2026 budget, rejecting two no-confidence motions and ending five months of tense negotiations that produced clear winners and losers. It’s a win for Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who took office in September with one clear mission: deliver “a budget for France”.

Social media ban in Spain – Spain will ban social media for under-16s in legislation that will be introduced as soon as next week. Online platforms will be required to implement effective age verification systems. Spanish premier Pedro Sánchez hailed a move to “protect children from the digital wild west.”

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