Glossary

Domain and technical terms you meet when using lebensmittel. For the option reference see the README and the full cookbook in Usage.md.

The portal

lebensmittelwarnung.de. Germany’s official portal for public product warnings, run by the Bundesamt für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit (BVL) together with the sixteen Länder. Each Land’s competent authority publishes its own warnings; the BVL operates the portal and app. It is the single national place where food and consumer-product recalls are announced to the public.

BVL — Bundesamt für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit. The federal agency that operates the portal and is the responsible publisher for warnings marked as covering “Deutschland” (nationwide).

Warnings

Warnung / Rückruf (warnings). A public product warning — usually a recall: a notice that a specific product (by name, batch and best-before) may pose a risk and should not be consumed/used. In this CLI each warning is one item of the RSS feed.

Grund der Meldung (reason). The reason the warning was issued, as a category label. On 2026-09-15 the live feed used seven: Allergene (allergens), Fremdkörper (foreign body), Gesundheitsschädliche Substanz (harmful substance), Irreführung und Täuschung (misleading labelling), Krankheitserreger (pathogens such as Listeria or Salmonella, which the feed doesn’t name), Rückstände und Kontaminanten (residues and contaminants) and Sonstige Gründe (other). A warning can carry several, joined with , . The single most useful field for triage.

Hersteller / Inverkehrbringer (manufacturer). The manufacturer or the party that placed the product on the market. The feed embeds the full postal address; this CLI collapses it to one line.

Betroffene Bundesländer nach derzeitigem Stand (affectedStates). The list of Länder where the product was distributed as currently known — it is updated over time, and a Land can add or remove itself after publication. Surfaced as a string[]. The --state feed filter selects by this list: a state feed holds the warnings whose affectedStates name that Land, whoever issued them.

Chargennummer / Los-Kennzeichnung (lotNumbers). The batch / lot identifiers of the affected units — the codes on the packaging that tell you whether your item is in scope.

Haltbarkeit (bestBefore). Durability information — a best-before (Mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum, MHD) or use-by date, again for matching your unit.

Verpackungseinheit (packaging). The packaging unit / size, e.g. “175 Gramm-Packung”.

Bildquelle. The image credit for the product photo (© the manufacturer or an agency). It appears in the generic fields map. The images themselves (imageUrls) are copyright-protected — see DATA_LICENSE.md.

Product types (`--type` / `types`)

The type= feed filter accepts five product-category slugs:

Slug	German	What it covers
`lebensmittel`	Lebensmittel	Food and drink (the bulk of warnings)
`kosmetischemittel`	Kosmetische Mittel	Cosmetics
`bedarfsgegenstaende`	Bedarfsgegenstände	Consumer goods in food contact / everyday use (packaging, kitchenware, textiles, …)
`mittelzumtaetowieren`	Mittel zum Tätowieren	Tattoo inks / agents
`babyundkinderprodukte`	Baby- und Kinderprodukte	Baby and children’s products

Federal states (`--state` / `states`)

The state= feed filter accepts sixteen Bundesland slugs (lowercase, no spaces or umlauts). Run lebensmittel states for the authoritative list; the mapping is:

Slug	Bundesland
`badenwuerttemberg`	Baden-Württemberg
`bayern`	Bayern
`berlin`	Berlin
`brandenburg`	Brandenburg
`bremen`	Bremen
`hamburg`	Hamburg
`hessen`	Hessen
`mecklenburgvorpommern`	Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
`niedersachsen`	Niedersachsen
`nordrheinwestfalen`	Nordrhein-Westfalen
`rheinlandpfalz`	Rheinland-Pfalz
`saarland`	Saarland
`sachsen`	Sachsen
`sachsenanhalt`	Sachsen-Anhalt
`schleswigholstein`	Schleswig-Holstein
`thueringen`	Thüringen

--state filters by the affectedStates distribution list, not by the Land that issued the warning. On 2026-09-15 --state thueringen returned exactly the warnings listing „Thüringen” in affectedStates, and only 4 of those 179 were issued by Thüringen. The feed has no issuer field; the notice URL carries the issuing Land as a code in its folder name (see Usage.md).

Technical terms

RSS 2.0. The XML feed format the portal publishes. Each warning is an <item> with <title>, <link>, <pubDate> and an HTML <description> (in a CDATA section). This CLI parses it with a hand-rolled, dependency-free parser.

pubDate / published. pubDate is the RFC-822 timestamp as served, in German time (“Wed, 8 Jul 2026 16:00:00 +0200”); published is that value normalised to an ISO-8601 UTC string. --since filters on it but compares calendar days in German time (Europe/Berlin): a notice stamped 00:00:00 +0200 counts for its own day, although the date part of published is the day before.

fields (label→value map). The complete set of <b>Label:</b> value pairs parsed from the description, keyed by the German label (trailing colon stripped). A superset of the typed accessors — anything the CLI doesn’t model first-class is still here.

Legacy JSON API (defunct). The old megov.bayern.de JSON API (documented in the bundesAPI / bund.dev project) that used to serve this data. It has returned an empty body since the portal relaunch and is not used — this CLI wraps the RSS feeds. See DEVELOPING.md.