The city's foodie clique is agog. Toronto Life, the city monthly that provides restaurant listings and mini reviews has thumbed its nose at the boss, Tony Gagliano, who owns St. Joseph Media which publishes Toronto Life, and whacked Gagliano's own restaurant, Via Allegro.

Now Toronto Life's anonymous reviews are admired for the art of evasion. "The food is simple, high-end Italian done with more panache than the neighbourhood usually offers. Salads are beautifully judged..."

So I was astonished to see the gloves taken right off for Via Allegra...surely a first....

"But on some evenings, at least, the food can disappoint, and the restaurant can operate according to an obvious class system, where evidently deep-pocketed patrons and regulars are served with courtesy and grace, and diners not fitting that description can face maddeningly indifferent—and even openly hostile—service. On one recent visit on a busy Wednesday evening, it takes more than 40 minutes for a server to bring bread to the table and nearly an hour for anyone to arrive with water—not a good beginning for a restaurant with pretensions of being one of the world’s best. Empty prosecco glasses sit unnoticed for 20 minutes. And when a sommelier brings the evening’s first wine pairing, he announces, “This is pinot noir, from France,” and turns to walk away. “Can you tell us more?” a diner asks. “It’s from 1997,” the sommelier says, looking impatient, turning again to leave. The diner: “Can you tell us who made it?” The sommelier, a veteran employee here, responds, “What, and do you also want to know the size of the shoes of the winemaker who grew the grapes?”"

What brave soul wrote this? Chris Nuttall Smith who recently resigned as TL food editor but left behind this billet-doux.

John Tierney's Science blog has excellent commentary on junk nutrition....."Before we pass any more laws on what to eat, I wish we’d take a harder look at how often the supposed experts in nutrition have been wrong before... "

The science writer Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories, writes that .... unlike science, nutritional hypotheses are not properly questioned and requestioned."

In science,

"Outstanding questions are identified or hypotheses proposed; experimental tests are than established to either answer the questions or refute the hypotheses, regardless of how obviously true they might appear to be. If assertions are made without the empirical evidence to defend them, they are vigorously rebuked. In science, as [the philosopher of science Robert] Merton noted, progress is only made by first establishing whether one’s predecessors have erred or “have stopped before tracking down the implications of their results or have passed over in their work what is there to be seen by the fresh eye of another.” Each new claim to knowledge, therefore, has to be picked apart and appraised. Its shortcomings have to be established unequivocally before we can know what questions remain to be asked, and so what answers to seek — what we know is really so and what we don’t. “This unending exchange of critical judgment,” Merton wrote, “of praise and punishment, is developed in science to a degree that makes the monitoring of children’s behavior by their parents seem little more than child’s play.”

But nutrition and obesity research don’t work this way. "The other problem with public health-related research is that the beliefs not only infect entire fields of science, but they spread beyond the science to the public, the politicians, etc., and so the number of those individuals invested in the erroneous belief grows exponentially and it becomes almost impossible to eradicate it or correct it."

"If public health research functioned like some of the harder sciences — high energy physics being the one I know best — then researchers would be ridiculed and perhaps even run out of the field for over-interpreting their evidence or publicly presenting the results of sloppy experiments or basing claims on premature evidence and none of this would have happened.

You can think of this kind of brutal response to bad science as an immune system that serves to protect reliable knowledge from infection by the infinite number of bogus but compelling ideas that are out there. The last place you want a science to find itself is where obesity research is today, with hypotheses of causation that can explain none of the pertinent observations, but yet are believed so fervently that no one can challenge them without being ostracized or declared a quack."

Tierny then asks "Is he right about the lack of an immune system in these fields of research? And if so, what can be done about it?"

the Sunday Times of London screamed "THE NEW RULES FOR DEFEATING CANCER!"

"Being even slightly overweight can increase the risk of a range of common cancers including breast, bowel and pancreatic cancer," an expert panel pulled together by the World Cancer Research Fund, has concluded.

The Times report continued" The largest review of links between diet and cancer, incorporating more than 7,000 studies, concludes that there is convincing evidence that excess body fat can cause at least six different types of the disease."

Cause is quite different from "can increase the risk".....But the dumb public doesn't read the fine print.. If we took the rules seriously we would now all drop red meat, bacon, all cured and salted meat, all sugar, starch and alcohol...no, wait a minute, alcohol is good for those with heart trouble... guess you have to choose...will i die from alchohol induced cancer or from alcohol deprived coronary?

"It's about time we had another good, old fashioned, hysterical, health scare, it's been at least five minutes since the last panic."
Mark Lyndon, London, UK