In my last edition of "What I Ate this Week", I noted somewhat offhand that the cheese atop my simple pasta with leftover vegetables was pecorino romano rather than parmigiano reggiano. After all, pecorino is usually much cheaper, and, in my opinion, almost as good. Almost immediately, I received email from Will saying that he had made the same switch, and wondering why the price difference was so extreme. My initial guess was that there was a difference in intellectual property regimes. I knew for a fact that parmigiano reggiano was protected by Certification Mark in the United States - a sort of trademark that allows people conforming to a quality standard to use a name for their product. And I assumed pecorino romano was not so protected - allowing italian producers who did not conform to the exacting requirements of the italian hard cheeses to undercut the parmesan makers. But that's not so - pecorino romano is protected by precisely the same kind of certification mark, given serious teeth by the fact that the registrant is bound not by US trademark law but by tough European geographical indication regulations. Nor is the difference in price governed by the price of the raw materials - both cheeses require roughly the same amount of milk, and if anything, pecorino's sheep's milk is more valuable than the cow of parmesan. So what's going on?

I'm not sure, but the answer Will provided after a little thought is probably correct, and so I reproduce it in full. My only doubt is driven by the fact that it is undeniably a self serving answer - if he's right, both Will and I get to bask in the knowledge that we're on the side of serious chefs, and by implication not on the side of the inherently less worthy followers of trends and vogues:

"I assume the price difference is a classic problem of price-
discrimination. Upper-middle-class families and professionals who
know they should be learning to cook and read the New York Times
dining section (and maybe own a few good cookbooks) have finally taken
to heart the vast difference in quality between imported and domestic
parmesan, and they can afford to drop 15 dollars a pound on cheese.

But the sharper, less friendly Peccorino hasn't become the same sort
of media darling, so it's favored mostly by more serious chefs and
sharp-eyed students with tight budget constraints. If and when the
Times starts pointing out the joys of Peccorino Romano, expect the
prices to move towards one another in a year or two."

Pauls Krugman and Goyette champion government regulation of obesity. Of what form exactly, neither one makes clear. (And since when did food become fairly classified as a "vice"?)

The Krugman op-ed is particularly appalling (words that I'm sure have been written before), since its basic thesis seems to be that all those glorious technocrats are being kept in check by primitive forces like an ideological belief in freedom, liberty, and choice.

Anyway, I do not mean to suggest that all people who eat a lot or eat unhealthily do so wholly "rationally", or that there is not a problem that might need to be cured. (I do dispute the notion that government-subsidized health care turns every private health problem into a public one.) But why does the existence of a so-called problem automatically militate for governmental intervention rather than nongovernmental public intervention? Why can't campaigns of education by medical experts, private weight-loss organizations, a decrease in land-use regulations for grocery stores, and other non-coercive social movements help those who wish to lose weight lose it while letting others happily munch on their french fries or turkish delights?

UPDATE: I have apparently misread Paul Goyette's post, as he clarifies here, but even in that post he seems to champion some sort of government intervention. Unlike him, I don't see why a publicity campaign would have to be funded by the government rather than the myriad medical foundations that already exist to funnel money into various medical interests. But if deregulation of grocery stores counts as government intervention, count me in.

As the New York Times and Associated Press point out, the feeding frenzy that has been developing the past few days over the Chief Justice has been quite . . . odd.

But not nearly as odd as the feeding frenzy that then developed late Friday afternoon when SCOTUSBlog and Robert Novak issued conflicting claims from conflicting anonymous sources about whether Rehnquist would retire Friday (he didn't). When a couple of short posts went up on SCOTUSBlog, then came off of the front page for a couple hours while new posts were being written, the commenters at Volokh and Red State went, well, nuts.

I was originally going to try to say something in response to this fellow who has decided that a little bit of fully-disclosed blog-editing is an "ineffectual and mysterious effort to rewrite history" and also announcing a project to find out "who the heck this Lederman guy is" but then I made the mistake of stumbling down the link to the Anti-SCOTUSBlog which is one of the weirder things I have seen since our parody blog closed up shop.

(The actual posts are amazingly spare in content, but the contents are frighteningly detailed, if not alway accurate or lucid. The site makes dear Article III Groupie look well-adjusted.) One must set one's limits..