I've been taking a break from blogging, not to get away from it but to concentrate on a 9,000-word speech and accompanying slide show I'm giving in February. I don't know if you've noticed but Klout sure has, dropping me from 61 to 57, so far. I wish I knew what that meant.

A few items have been hanging around the desktop, waiting for me to do something with them, so I'm just tossing them all into this news salad (ugh, another stupid food allusion, like that weak-ass headline).

Like most folks, I'm a sucker for "best" lists, and this is the season for them. From Civil Eats comes a list of the year's best food and agriculture books, and I wanted to share it. It combines mainstream titles such as Barry Estabrook's Tomatoland and The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz with an excellent range of other titles I was glad to learn about.

I thought I’d discuss self-regulation in a different context than in my last post, which was titled, “‘Self-regulation?’ That’s like ‘no regulation,’ right?” Then I was referring to Big Food, which argues that it can police itself and therefore deserves no interference from public-health meddlers.

I’d been saving Jon Entine’s post in Forbes on a back screen for a while, motivated by the headline, “Is 2013 a Watershed Year for the Anti-Obesity Movement?”/ and I finally got to it.

What a bunch of hooey!

Though not every addict experiences the same lack of control for every addictive substance or behavior, an addict is an addict.

This is borne out by the phenomenon of switching addictions, whose classic example is, for me, old AA meetings: They were chokingly thick with cigarette smoke and had officers assigned to ensure the meetings would be adequately supplied with coffee (with or without sugar and cream) and donuts.

And, surely you know someone who, say, quit smoking and gained 40 pounds.

I've been remiss in reporting a key development in the fight for public recognition of food addiction: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, whose statute allows it to say what is a mental illness and what isn't, has indeed included binge-eating disorder in its fifth edition.

In my typically reasoned and reasonable fashion, I argued yesterday that we should choose not to schedule bake sales in schools to raise money for programs. I conceded that such sales are a hometown institution that embraces fond memory and other positive content.

As an advocate on issues including obesity, nutrition, and school food, I’ve had an opinion on bake sales, and especially school bake sales, for some time. But until about a week ago, they were something that people did, as opposed to something that people did in my son’s school.

Research published in the Journal of Pediatrics says that obese kids are more susceptible to Big Food’s marketing come-ons, which should surprise no one, since they’re the ones (apparently) acting more often on those messages.

Ten overweight kids and 10 healthy weight kids were shown 120 logos, half of them to do with food, so their brain responses could be observed. From a synopsis: