Photo: AP

The yogurt business is not the happy field of pleasant cows that you might imagine. It’s a seething hive of trickery, con jobs, and hustlers who will go to almost any length to make you, the consumer, forget that you are eating bad yogurt.

Cry over spilt milk? I won’t. But you know who should? You, the consumer. Because it is become increasingly clear that Big Yogurt has a smokescreen hiding around every last corner. And none of those smokescreens are made of high quality thick and creamy yogurt with a satisfying mouthfeel.

Yesterday, one Yogurt Company That Will Not Be Named wallowed in kudos for a very public Gesture That Shall Not Be Named designed to financially enrich its hardworking employees. Lost amid the plaudits from the easily distracted punditry was the fact that Chobani tastes like cow piss. One imagines that a large financial windfall is the very least that the executives of this Yogurt Company That Will Not Be Named could do to compensate its employees for the fact that they may never know the pleasure of using their yogurtmaking skills to produce yogurt that is actually tasty.

We shall speak no more of this.

We shall, however, relay to you the grim fact that this sort of dairy-based sleight of hand is not unique to the Yogurt Company That Will Not Be Named. It seems that DANNON, the yogurt that you ate when you were a kid before they invented good yogurt, is now undertaking an ostentatious program to ensure you, the consumer, that DANNON uses milk suppliers that adhere to various “animal welfare standards” and other environmental practices from which one can derive positive feelings. Not part of the new set of standards: a standard for making good yogurt.

Such gestures by these second-rate yogurt companies should be applauded. A gentle clap as you pass by them in the yogurt aisle on the way to the good yogurt should be sufficient.