Everything seems to be at some kind of end of the road. The world is turned upside down, purposes seem scattered, and nothing seems to make sense anymore. It wades in a kind of uncertainty soup, and almost nothing remains as you knew it from one day to another. The waters are starting to settle, and it's very possible that in just one year, the dark waters, not the clear ones, will flood over us, and that's because of us, primarily, not others.

If we think about the two themes of this magazine, meat and milk, the feeling of the end of the road is even more pronounced. The owners of companies, be they farmers or processors, in these two areas, seem to be clinging desperately to revive some past purposes. But that can no longer be done. Those purposes no longer find their place in today's world and, especially, in tomorrow's.

If you think about meat, you indeed see that people are not giving it up, but at the same time, you notice the young ones who are heading towards a different way of life, a different diet where alternatives are gaining more weight.

There's no doubt that subtle policies to manipulate consumer behavior are driving towards that. But when institutional limitations come, it will be the farmers and processors who will lose. Not the stores. And not the consumers either, because people adapt.

On the other hand, when it comes to milk, a bitter smile appears on your lips when you see dairy farmers talking about increasing consumption and sales while the big companies, the ones really shaping the market, are opening divisions for producing dairy alternatives. Unthinkable, isn't it!?

Even the newer laws seem to be directed towards the past, not the future, since the bulk of the population of tomorrow, those between the ages of 18 and 35, prefer to buy other foods, not the ones that still receive emphasis in yesterday's and today's production.

No more than five years from now, we see a significantly modified consumer behavior of Romanians and a decrease in the sales of meat, meat products, milk, and dairy products, and this is not due to prices but simply because they won't be fashionable anymore. Really! Because the youth today are influenced by fashion, not reason.

And all these things will take the market far away from what it is now and even further from what it was in the recent past. And for those who will not adapt, it will be much, much more until that distance which, in fact, they will never reach, being surpassed, as always in history, by those from outside, especially since the market will open even more, despite some current sovereign-nationalist accents.