Appetite

After an exhausting political fight to put an $11.1-billion plan for shoring up the state's water supply before voters, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger now wants to yank the measure from the November ballot. The governor is working with legislative leaders to postpone the water bond proposal as its prospects appear increasingly dim. Polls suggest voters may not have the appetite for such borrowing at a time when the state budget is in continuing crisis. And the governor's vow to aggressively fight another measure on the November ballot, one that would roll back the landmark global warming bill he signed in 2006, threatens to distract from the effort to get the water bond passed.

There's a Calvinist streak marbling the fat of any good American eater: One hand giveth and the other taketh away. I should. I shouldn't. Pleasure and pain. I want it but I shouldn't have it. This is a good time to reflect on just how American our obsession with food really is. And unlike television shows about food, which are for the most part fun and entertaining, and, yes, even informative, books about food cross a wide array of emotion, from memoirs dripping with nostalgia about Mom's kitchen to impassioned manifestoes about changing the way we, the world, eat. Look at the shelves at your local bookstore: There are relaxing volumes by foodies, amateur and professional, which are pure pleasure.

In the late afternoon of April 12, 32-year-old Nguyen Tran of North Hollywood stepped into the KFC at the corner of Witmer and West 6 t h streets near downtown Los Angeles. After a few minutes of scrutinizing the menu board, and glancing at the store's signage, he leaned across the counter and asked the man behind the counter, in an almost conspiratorial voice: "Do you guys have that … you know … the Double Down?" When the cashier tentatively bobbed his head in affirmation, Tran pumped his fist in the air, uttered an excited "Sweet!"

President Obama's victory on healthcare gave him some much-needed political momentum. But he seems disinclined to ride that into another all-in battle this year on his keystone domestic agenda items of climate change and immigration. Instead, the White House is planning to focus on narrower efforts to pump up the economy, rewrite financial regulation, amend campaign finance laws to limit corporate donations and impose new fees on banks to repay federal bailout funds. The White House is careful to say that it remains strongly committed to overhauling immigration and limiting greenhouse gases.

If changes in the public mood and the party alignment of the U.S. Senate have stalled healthcare legislation, they may have thrown the highly anticipated climate bill under a bus. Even before Republican Scott Brown's stunning election to the Senate in traditionally Democratic Massachusetts last month, it was proving hard to corral moderate Democrats to support a bill capping greenhouse gas emissions. Now they're afraid to back anything that could be perceived as harmful to the economy.

Adele Cabot and her husband used to dine out three or four times a week, regularly spending $75 to $100 at a sushi bar sampling rainbow rolls and yellowtail nigiri sushi. But that changed after Cabot, an adjunct professor of theater at UCLA, had to take a 6% salary cut. The couple now eat out half as much and frequent less expensive Mexican and Italian places. "I just don't want to spend the money to eat out a lot," Cabot said. With Thanksgiving this week and Christmas next month, restaurants are eager to win back customers such as Cabot who seemed to disappear amid a brutal summer for the nation's eateries.

Barbara Fairchild joined Bon Appétit in 1978 as an editorial assistant typing (yes, on a typewriter) recipes. Today, she runs the magazine, and with the closure of Gourmet last month, has become one of the most watched women in food publishing. After all, her Los Angeles-based magazine is the sibling that survived in Condé Nast's bloodletting. She's a powerful executive who splits her time between homes in Studio City and New York, when she's not at one of the many events she runs or attends all year.

Pasadena has a fork in the road. And it's 18 feet tall. Where south St. John and south Pasadena avenues divide, there's a towering wooden silver fork in the traffic median. The utensil has a black steel skeleton and is rooted in 2 1/2 feet of concrete. The art was originally intended as a surprise for Bob Stane of Altadena, who celebrated his 75th birthday Oct. 29. But Caltrans, which owns the median, and Pasadena, which maintains the land, are deciding whether to keep it up for a while as an impromptu piece of street art. "It was just the best birthday present I've ever had," said Stane, who owns the Coffee Gallery Backstage, a coffeehouse and showroom in Altadena, with the fork's artist, Ken Marshall.

California came up short as it tried to sell longer-term municipal bonds to individual investors this week -- the first such sale since last spring. The steep decline in market yields on muni bonds since July has left many investors unwilling to lock up their money in new bonds, traders said. California, which is offering $1.3 billion in tax-free general obligation bonds to finance voter-approved infrastructure projects, said it took in orders for $428 million, or 33% of the total, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

California today will launch a $4.5-billion sale of municipal bonds to finance infrastructure projects, in a deal that will test investors' recently strong appetite for fixed-rate debt. It's California's first long-term bond offering since April and comes just two weeks after the state sold $8.8 billion in short-term notes. The California muni bond market has been starved for supply over the last two months, with the result that market yields on long-term tax-free bonds have edged lower nearly every week -- because investors have, in effect, been fighting over what little is available.