I've been thinking about the obesity mini-fuffle stemming from Paul Krugman's column on the subject. I hesitated to write anything because Will and Amber and Pejman said roughly what I meant to say, while Mr. Goyette represented the best version of the opposing argument.

But one very obvious point that hadn't been made explicitly occurred to me while I was running off bar review frustration tonight - namely, that what I've suddenly decided to call the "fries don't kill you, calories do" counterargument to government regulation is wrong. In other words, if the government did impose strong regulations on junk food, I believe that Americans would lose weight dramatically. They would not simply replace the lost calories by eating something else.

I partly believe this because it meshes so neatly with my own experience. As I've noted before somewhere on this blog, I've been nearly 80 pounds heavier than I am at the moment. It wasn't pleasant, looking back on it. And the proximate cause of losing all that weight was leaving the United States. I'll grant that I moved to Scotland, long considered the least healthy country in Europe. I'm probably the first person in history of man to have lost weight in Scotland for reasons other than malnutrition. And yet, even there, portions were smaller, fast food more expensive, and the difference in quality between less healthy fast food and real food so extreme that the latter became much more desirable. People really don't have self control - or, at least, I don't have self control - and the necessarily more limited Scottish fast food diet made sure that the occasional slip up was neither particularly disastrous nor often repeated. People do not become obese on six ounce tins of "Irn Bru".

Of course, the fact that government regulation would work is no argument to impose government regulation. Lots of government regulation works in the narrow sense. To take a timely (and incendiary) example, if the British simply emulated Edward I and expelled every muslim from their island, fundamentalist attacks on the city would become less likely. In a sick sense, the regulation would have "worked'. But they would also be guilty of a great transgression against human rights. And though the stakes in the food regulation battle are obviously lower (as much as I think having control over what you eat is a matter of liberty, exile is worse), the fact that regulation would work is neither here nor there. But I thought I should mention it regardless.

Josie and Jack: A Novel - Kelly Braffet

I am even more behind in my usual pace of reading than Will, but with even less of an excuse to offer--I'm working a nine to five job, and have plenty of free time that I could be spending reading.

I picked up Josie and Jack on the recommendation of Our Girl in Chicago and was not in any way disappointed. It's a solid entry in one of my favorite genres - children of priviledge behaving badly - and has all of the witty quips, accounts of debauchery, disturbing yet arousing sexual undertones, and highly skewed moral compasses that serve to make the genre so generally enjoyable. It's also literary enough that one need not even count it as a guilty pleasure.

If I felt like quibbling, the novel takes a rather schizophrenic view towards what might be called real-world consequences, allowing their possiblity to intrude into the somewhat dreamy world of the two main characters when it suits the plot, but allowing much more egregious acts to go, not just unpunished, but contemplated, executed, and meditated upon without even the consideration of the possiblity of consequences. Fortunately, when I finished the book, I didn't feel like dwelling on my quibbles.

I figure I had better write this now, otherwise it isn't getting done. So onward, bar review or not:

Breakfast: Croissants - for the past three weeks, I've been making a batch of croissants on sunday morning. My results have been improving, dramatically, and I'll soon be able to write a post about my little quest. It suffices to say for now that in terms of taste, flakiness, and even color, my croissant is better than almost everything available in Cambridge. The fact that I'm too clumsy to do the shape right is a different, and less interesting problem.

Lunch: Smoked Salmon, Cream Cheese, and Caper sandwiches - there's nothing original here. In fact, I ripped the idea off expressly from Darwin's, a nice sandwich shop/cafe here in the square. I like the way they make the sandwich, but at $7.25 it's prohibitive. My own version, complete with the ingredients above plus sliced cucumbers, was much cheaper. I like the sandwich on ciabatta, but do what you want.

Dinner:

Pollock with caper sauce: Pollock is not the most exciting of fish. But it is a good vehicle for using up capers, of which I had far too many lying about. The fish was broiled, and the sauce is simply butter, lemon, a touch of anchovy, and capers. Photo here.

Pasta Puttanesca - more capers! This is simply a tomato sauce with olive, capers, more anchovy, and red pepper flakes. Delicious and light.

Roasted Red Pepper with Goat Cheese: Red peppers are in season, and they are wonderful roasted in the oven at high heat (to get rid of the skins - I don't go in for all that skin removal by blowtorch that some people recommend). The red peppers were dressed with garlic vinaigrette (the garlic roasted with the peppers for mildness), and a round of young goat cheese. Photo here.

Dessert:

Tarte Aux Petits Machins Bleus - Umm, blueberry tart, as made by Clementine in my recently discussed read Clementine in the Kitchen. The tart is the utmost in simplicity - a butter crust, baked blind (picture of that here), and then filled with blueberries and a little raspberry jam mixed with water. The tart, as eaten, is pictured here. It seems to me that a little lemon ice would make a wonderful accompaniment, but I don't have a freezer.

I hadn't noticed that the house voted to repeal the D.C. gun ban until a co-blogger sent along this Times editorial decrying the congressional vote as an interference with local autonomy. Given the Times's fair-weather-at-best support for the notion that states ought to enjoy some freedom from Congressional lawmaking, it is rather odd that the Times suddenly rediscovers federalism when it is a federal enclave at issue. (The Constitution grants Congress plenary lawmaking authority over D.C., which is not a state; it grants no such authority over the states themselves.)

Incidentally, when Congress passed gun legislation that regulated the uses of guns near schools across the U.S., the Times did not suggest that Congress ought to be forced to take the salary of a local school-board member. (The law, it tured out, was unconstitutional.) C.f. The High Court Loses Restraint, Editorial, N.Y. Times, Apr. 29, 1995, at 22 (criticizing Supreme Court's decision to strike down Gun Free School Zones Act because it refused to recognize the virtues of Congressional Supremacy).

UPDATE: I concede. Partly.

Daniel Solove recommends making the Constitution easier to amend. How much easier, he does not say, although my own inclination is to agree. (There are still other questions, such as whether one ought to make it easier for amendments to get out of Congress, easier for them to pass through the states, or both.) Not too easy, though.

Solove suggests that this change would decrease the politicized fight over judicial appointments, and here I am slightly less sure. To be sure, various constitutional decisions (Legal Tender, Darby, Roe) engender serious movements about the need to clean judicial house, but I am not positive that creating another way to change these decisions will be enough to change the fight over the Court.

Consider, for example, this scurrilous attack on Justice Thomas; a huge number of the cases it cites to attack Thomas's position involve statutory construction of AEDPA and the relevant habeas statutes, or the Voting Rights Act, et. al. People often get worked up not about whether the issue is constitutional or statutory, but just where the decision comes down. To be sure, these cases and many other high-stakes statutory ones are laced with Constitutional overtones, but a number of them could be overruled by a Congress that cared to.

So the degree to which making the Constitution easier to amend (i.e., "outsourcing Constitutional complexity") will make judicial nominations less contested presumably depends both on how many thorny political statutory interpretation questions remain, and on how much easier we make it. I mention this only as a relevant caveat.

[Incidentally, given the existence of amendments like the Flag-Burning Amendment, which are overwhelmingly popular and would clearly pass almost all the states posthaste if ever let out by the Senate, why don't the requisite quorum of states simply demand a Constitutional Convention for one? I am aware of the arguments, which I find convincing, that there can be no such thing as a "limited Constitutional Convention" but are these arguments widely accepted? (I am also aware of the argument by Michael Stokes Paulsen, which I also find convincing, that Congress is right now obligated to call a Constitutional Convention because it has in fact received applications from well over 2/3 of the states, but that is neither here nor there.)]

I believe I have read fewer books in the first half of this year than in any year since I started keeping track. (2002, with 21 books before June 30, was a close runner-up, but there were 59 books in the second half.) Chalk this up to law school, to several hundred law review articles read that took the place of books, and so on. And chalk up the latest delay to the opaque but enjoyable Umberto Eco, whose Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana I have finally finished.

The main character is an oldish used book dealer who loses his episodic memory and can therefore remember nothing but the books he has read (and even then, only ones with no real emotional attachment to his life). He goes off to his childhood home and rummages through the attic, trying to remember things-- lost lives, loves, lyrics, and so on. A few things happen, but none can really be disclosed without spoiling the book's minimal plot. All in all the book is enjoyable, but marginally unfathomable-- more like a short story that devolves for about a hundred pages into a few stream-of-consciousness-notes before being set back on the rails. My understanding is that this is true of some of his other novels too, although truth be told I have never finished one other than The Name of the Rose (Eco's non-fiction, on the other hand, I devour).

He came to speak in D.C. recently and somebody complained that his books were very difficult. His reply: "Yes, but I write for masochists."

True enough.

If anyone at all is interested in the history of "geographical indications" (as mentioned in my recent post on pecorino romano) I recommend my own class paper on the subject, available online here. In it you will find a relatively full history of the 1907 Wine Revolt in France, (at II.B.2, about which I blogged in briefer form here), some interesting notes about Kona coffee (III.F), a description of the current European regime of geographical indication (II.C), a short history of the 1902 Food and Drug Act in the United States (at III.C, which was the first law passed at the federal level to protect geographical indication, in some sense) , and a history of France's long battle to impose its own geographical indication regime on the rest of the world (with some justification) in both Part IV and Appendix B.

This was just a class paper, meant to be 25 pages or so. I wrote (much) more because it was fun, but certainly it is still some ways from what I consider publishable form. But I still hope someone finds it of use, or simply of interest.