"If this is your first time being poor..." this is how Kiki Rough opens her "Recession Recipes" videos on TikTok: bean "meatloaf," chickpea "chicken nuggets," whatever gets a family fed on cheap ingredients and pantry staples.

It got me looking into my own childhood meals, growing up in Germany: Eintopf, Pellkartoffeln mit Quark, Königsberger Klopse. All of them are considered "struggle meals", even though I never saw them as such.

The memories sent me down a rabbit hole and I looked into YouScan Social Listening ✨ data to see how struggle meals and the nostalgia of Oma's recipes are being discussed online.

You don’t expect parakeets in London. But then you hear them. They screech loudly as they zoom through the air, like a green-feathered bullets. They never stop by on my balcony though. I put out some food and get the occasional visitors: magpies, jays, even some crows and unfortunately the dreaded London pigeons, which I try to shoo away quickly. But never the parakeets.

As I sit here, a little jay watching me as it picks up a peanut, I cannot help but wonder if talking about birdwatching makes me sound like an old woman. It’s got that sheen of anoraks and retirement home. But recent statistics tell a different story.

Which supermarket has the best caterpillar cake?

Which? has actually just released the results of a blind taste test of 9 supermarket caterpillar cakes, and Waitrose's Cecil came first. M&S Colin - the OG, the icon, the one that started it all in 1990 - came last with 64%.

So I pulled YouScan social listening data to understand what's actually being said online. And it turns out people are not just picking a favourite. They're evaluating caterpillar cakes on a surprisingly specific set of criteria: the ratio of buttercream to sponge, the structural integrity of the chocolate coating, the aesthetic quality of the face and feet.

The choice of cake has become a form of social signalling. For many people, the caterpillar cake isn't really a cake. It's a ceremonial object. And the thickness of the chocolate shell is a measure of how much you care.

So why has nobody ever successfully premiumised it?

Do you ever check Rotten Tomatoes before watching a film?
I do. But I wonder how much those scores really reflect taste anymore.

When I looked at social listening data via YouScan Social Listening ✨, there was a clear debate: critics vs audiences, “overrated” vs “underrated”, people searching for validation as much as evaluation.

If ratings shape the conversation before we’ve even had the experience, are they still helping us discover culture?

I wrote a piece for @Greenbook on a common research dilemma: what to do when cross-cultural fieldwork clashes with holiday seasons. We’ve all heard the usual advice: pause, delay, avoid. But in a world where people are online 24/7, does that still stack up?