Sunday roundup

Unlike the Ombudsman, I see no value in Jennifer Rubin's blog. Her posts are simplistic, hateful, petty, and unprofessional, and her Norway post and subsequent "clarification" were bad journalism, if they could be called journalism. But I agree with the Ombudsman: calling her vile names and issuing vile threats are not appropriate.

You may think I've no standing to discuss clam chowder, but you'd be wrong: I've only been for not quite a year, and I was a pescetarian for two decades before that. And that, too, is irrelevant, because the issue is filler vs. flavor. So even though clam chowder is but a case study, and not the issue at steak, in Steve Pearlstein's generally interesting column, I have a dog in this chowder fight: removing the core ingredients and substituting them with flour is a bad bet all around. Oh, and Mr. Pearlstein's key point is an excellent one: consumer paradigms change. There's no reason to keep doing things the way they've always been done.

Your store-bought orange juice isn't as natural as it claims to be.

These are the kind of foodies that make the rest of us look bad.