The Guardian reports that Richard Burden, Labour MP, likened the news of the takeover as “a kick to the stomach.” And on twitter, thousands are venting frustration like the British author Jojo Moyes: “Watching Cadbury chairman defending the Kraft deal is making me feel sicker than if I’d eaten a dozen Creme Eggs.”

For some, it’s a matter of taste, as Kay Burley, a blogger on the UK site SkyNews.com writes:

“Will the lady still love Milk Tray after a U.S. company has its mitts on it? Let’s face it, American chocolate is not a patch on ours. Hershey’s and the like can be up in arms as much as they want, it is a fact that our chocolate tastes better, it just does. Will they honour Creme Eggs at Easter? Will my Curly Wurly still be chewy and chocolatey in equal measure? When it comes to the Crunchie, will their version or Rose’s grow on me? I’m not sure.”

On Epicurious.com, Food Editor Sarah Kagan tries to offer some solace to Cadbury lovers by pointing out that although American chocolate does taste different, particularly Hershey’s, which already manufactured Cadbury products for the U.S. market, the recipe is unlikely to cross the Atlantic. Kagan writes:

“In recent days, signs have cropped up outside Cadbury’s Birmingham headquarters, festooned with British flags and reading ‘Kraft Go to Hell.’ Chocolate fans are warning that Kraft’s history of making what they call ‘plastic cheese’ spells doom for Cadbury’s iconic, rich, creamy Dairy Milk bars.

“In the U.K., milk chocolate must contain at least 20 percent cocoa solids, while in the U.S. the percentage can be as low as ten. Hershey’s also says it tailors its Cadbury recipes to American tastes for a sweeter product.”

But if it seems odd that chocolate should so capture the British sense of national identity, it is even more so in the face of other, more substantive losses of national production to international buyers. As Ian King of the Times of London explains:

“During the last 15 years, an Indian company has bought our biggest steelmaker and one of our few remaining carmakers; a Japanese company our biggest glassmaker; the Italians a famous helicopter manufacturer; the Dutch our leading chemicals company; while a succession of French and German companies bought many of our power generators… Dubai bought our biggest ports operator and Spanish companies variously bought our biggest airport operator, our biggest mobile phone operator and our second-biggest mortgage lender.

In this time, the majority of Britons have stood by in silence. Yet, bizarrely, the country is now up in arms over the takeover of a chocolate maker by an American company notorious for selling plastic cheese and processed meat.”

The revised bid is for 500 pence cash and 0.1874 new Kraft shares for each Cadbury share, still somewhat less than some analysts believed the company is worth but 50 percent higher than Cadbury’s market value before Kraft went public with its approach in September.

A previous offer of 10.5 billion pounds ($17.1 billion) valued Cadbury at about 770 pence, but was dismissed by Cadbury as “derisory.”

Kraft Foods Inc., maker of Toblerone chocoloate, Velveeta processed cheese and Oreo cookies, still has to persuade a majority of Cadbury shareholders to accept the deal, and the door remains open until 7 a.m. (0200 GMT) Monday for The Hershey Co. to jump in with a rival bid.

The combined companies would be the world leader in chocolate and sweets, Kraft said, and No. 2 globally in the high-growth gum market. But some in Britain are disgruntled at the prospect of a historic brand losing its independence.

Cadbury’s roots go back to the grocery store opened in 1824 by John Cadbury in Birmingham. A Quaker, Cadbury believed cocoa and drinking chocolate were healthy alternatives to alcohol, considered to add to the miseries of the working class.

Its Dairy Milk chocolate brand was launched in 1905 as a challenge to dominant Swiss chocolate makers.

“We have great respect for Cadbury’s brands, heritage and people. We believe they will thrive as part of Kraft Foods,” said Kraft’s CEO Irene Rosenfield.

“This recommended offer represents a compelling opportunity for Cadbury shareholders, providing both immediate value certainty and upside potential in the combined company.”

Cadbury Chairman Roger Carr, who had led a spirited defense against Kraft’s previous offer, said he believed the deal “represents good value for Cadbury shareholders.”

Cadbury shares were up 3.3 percent at 834 pence following the announcement.

“Although we always considered that 850 pence could be enough to win shareholder support we have to admit surprise at how meekly Cadbury has apparently acquiesced,” said Jeremy Batstone-Carr, analyst at Charles Stanley & Co.

Only last week, Batstone-Carr added, the Cadbury chairman “had confidently predicted that the company’s share price could be over 10 pounds (1,000 pence) in due course.”

Kraft predicted pretax cost savings of at least $675 million a year once the combination has been working for three years.

Tuesday was the deadline for Kraft to raise its offer. Cadbury shares moved above 800 pence on Monday, indicating the market was looking for Kraft to jump to that level or higher.

The British company had fought hard against Kraft’s initial offer announced in December, rejecting it as a “derisory” bid from what it considered an unfocused, underperforming conglomerate.

The agreed price is 13 times Cadbury’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization; Cadbury had argued that similar recent takeovers in the sector had been for 14 times EBITDA or more.

Feb. 2 is the deadline for Kraft to win acceptance from holders of a majority of Cadbury shares.

David Cumming, head of U.K. equities at Cadbury shareholder Standard Life, had said Monday that Kraft needed to aim above 900 pence to secure support from long-term shareholders. But on Tuesday, he signaled the fight was over. “I probably won’t go against the view of Cadbury’s management,” he told the BBC.

Kraft, based in Northfield, Illinois, had raised the cash portion of its offer earlier this month from 300 pence to 360 pence after selling its North America pizza business to Nestle for $3.7 billion.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffet, whose Berkshire Hathaway is Kraft’s biggest shareholder, had warned against offer any more shares for Cadbury. Buffett declared last year that he believed Kraft’s original offer for Cadbury was “pretty full.”

Kraft said the latest offer reduces the share portion, and thus won’t need to be approved by its shareholders.

Cadbury has some 45,000 employees in 60 countries, including 5,600 staff in British and Irish plants. The amount of debt being taken on to fund the deal is raising worries about cutbacks.

“This is a very sad day for U.K. manufacturing. A successful, iconic, independent U.K. brand will now be owned by a giant company with massive debt,” said Jennie Formby of the Unite union, which had campaigned against Kraft’s offer.

“We have very real fears about how Kraft will repay its debt, particularly as it has ratcheted it up still further in order to purchase Cadbury,” Formby said.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters that the government was “determined that the levels of investment that take place in Cadbury’s in the United Kingdom are maintained.”

“We are determined of course, that, at a time when people are worried about their jobs, jobs in Cadbury can be secured.”

The report of a deal drew a sharp response from Felicity Loudon, a great granddaughter of Cadbury’s founder Egbert Cadbury.

“I don’t know what they’re doing,” Loudon told Sky News. “Kraft will have to asset strip to afford anything.”

I spoke with Brian Wansink, author of “Mindless Eating” and director of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, where he does things like making bowls that slowly refill themselves to see how much soup a person will unconsciously eat if it’s sitting in front of them.

Let’s get right to it: Will this ad be effective?

Well, it’s getting a lot of buzz, but it’ll be most effective for the people who need it the least, people who are already very nutrition vigilant — they’ll be the ones talking about it. People with healthy lifestyles see something like that, and they all start talking about it like it’s the coolest thing since the toaster.

But the people who need it the most are going to be the most dismissive. There’s a segment of people in between who will respond to it, but as in a lot of these campaigns in the past, the effect is extremely temporary.

People’s food habits are what they are because they like them. They might drink less soda today or tomorrow. But then they might forget about the message, or if they see it over and over, they’ll become immune or dismissive of it.

OK, let’s back up a little bit. Say you had a bad time with brown liquor and can never have whiskey again. How do we create associations with food that last?

Well, it’s very fortunate that we do, first of all. It’s evolutionary driven. The kind of person who ate sour berries and kept getting sick eating sour berries eventually died from eating sour berries. Let’s say you get pneumonia and you had fried fish beforehand — you’ll be a long time from having fried fish again. It’s your body thinking, “That almost killed me.” But these aversions don’t always last a lifetime. The taste for it might come back, depending on how much you liked the food beforehand. If you’ve never had it before, that’s it. It’s never going to happen.

We did a really cool study of WWII vets in the South Pacific, on whether they ate Chinese food 50 years after the war. The basic conclusion was that if people weren’t in heavy combat, they could still like it. But if they did experience combat, they hated, hated, hated Chinese food even 50 years later, with the exception of one small group who liked Chinese food before going to war. Remember, this was in the ’40s, so not very many people had had it, but those who did, could like it again. But if the first time you had it was with grenades thrown at you …

But this ad can be pretty traumatic, even if not on that level. Why can’t this ad create those kinds of associations?

To some extent, it’s the visual thing. If you’re a big lover of soft drinks, you won’t suspend disbelief. You know how you can do that thing? “It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie. Because I like Coke.” There isn’t a powerful physiological connection, like what eating a bad piece of fish will produce. That’s a real important part of this.

So is an ad campaign useless?

By itself, it will be pretty much useless. The memory trace of that ad might be strong, but it’s going to be pretty short, and will be pretty easily overwhelmed by the fact that you’re hungry.

Does it have a positive impact? Yeah, but the most positive impact will be on people who need that the least. There are probably some people who really don’t know there are a lot of calories in pop, so it might be a positive influence. But if they don’t know that, they might not care.

So if this won’t work, what would be effective?

So much goes back to what we do in our homes. We keep believing, “It’s not me, it’s the fast food industry, the soda industry, etc.” But once a parent or nutritional gatekeeper realizes that they control 72 percent of what their family eats, then it can be like, “Wait, there’re a lot of small things I can do.” Put a fruit bowl out. Don’t go to a cheesy chain, and order a salad instead of fries and ranch dressing.

It’s tricky to imprint these influences. You might be a great nutritional role model, but your kids may rebel against you. So there’s a balance you have to strike. 

No food-borne illness has sickened more schoolkids in the past decade than norovirus, and none is linked as consistently to improper food handling in cafeterias, a USA TODAY investigation found.

Data kept by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that norovirus caused at least one-third of the 23,000 food-borne illness cases reported in schools from 1998 through 2007. The toll: about 7,500 sick children, USA TODAY found. Those figures represent just a fraction of all cases. Investigators suspected but couldn’t confirm norovirus in nearly 2,000 additional illnesses in schools during that period, and the CDC says many more cases go unreported.

The purpose of the inspection requirement is to ensure that the facilities and workers comply with safety and sanitary requirements — from checking food temperatures to wearing gloves.

But the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the school lunch program, acknowledges that the rule is almost impossible to enforce…

Federal data show that more than half the schools in eight states — including California and New York— failed to meet the requirement for two inspections during the 2007-08 school year. In Maine, the state where the fewest schools conformed to the law, fewer than 1% of schools met the requirement that year.

Although such outbreaks often begin in the cafeteria, more than 8,500 schools failed to have their kitchens inspected at all last year, and another 18,000 fell short of a requirement in the Child Nutrition Act that calls for cafeteria inspections at least twice a year, USA TODAY found. The mandate is part of the National School Lunch Program, which provides food for 31 million schoolchildren across the nation. Almost every school in the United States receives food as part of the program.

Well, that last part about receiving food from the National School Lunch Program is, in fact, part of the problem, if memory serves. Reading Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation, the one part that is indelibly seared into my brain is the “shit is in the meat” line he writes after explaining how recalled beef shipments that didn’t pass inspection for sale in supermarkets are often bought by the USDA and then distributed to the schools. Hopefully, that no longer happens at the rates it did before FFN went to print. But still…

Anyway, USA Today provides a 50-state ranking so you can check out how your state fared in terms of inspections here. On the east coast, it’s almost 1 p.m.–enjoy your lunch!