Eating at home isn't the in thing anymore. Hanging out is hip, especially in the mushrooming fast food joints that blister the skylines of India's cities. The urban middle classes with money to burn are redefining nouvelle cuisine. The costs are huge but few are counting the calories fewer still checking the nutrition chart.

Eating habits, cooking habits, cuisines have changed, are changing, across the country, across social strata, across the rural-urban divide. And for anybody’s money, it isn’t a change to inspire confidence in the future of public health.

The price-nutrition dynamic plays out differentially in the developed and developing worlds. In the former, as a number of studies have noted, fast food constitutes a much greater proportion of the diet of the poor.

In our December 31, 2006 issue we raised some questions in the editorial, 'Economics of congestion'. Readers responded. Here is a cross section of views Theory-practice hiatus Shreekant Gupta,

Pesticide poisoning: In the first case of legal action against contamination and death caused by agrochemicals, the Paraguayan Supreme Court held two growers responsible for the death of 11-year-old