I didn’t fully appreciate it when I visited there a few months ago, but Copenhagen is a major centre for the study and treatment of Diabetes. Novo Nordisk, headquartered there (as evidenced by the posters advertising them in Copenhagen Kastrup airport), has diabetes study as its main business. A friend of mine in the business recently attended a conference there on diabetes attended by thousands.

I think I’ve learnt another good reason to try harder at slimming down my waistline by a few inches. But it’s clear that the world is facing a huge challenge in tackling this disease.

Why going to the barber’s is like going to the dentist

• You have to sit very still or bad things happen. This is tricky and you tend to squirm. From time to time they re-orient your head.
• They have a special chair that goes up and down.
• They have a large variety of alarming specialist equipment.
• It’s hard to find a good one.

Why going to the barber’s isn’t like going to the dentist

• They are much cheaper.
• It isn’t as painful – normally.

The similarities may not be entirely coincidental. Barbers used to perform surgery – and this is the origin of the red (and sometimes blue) colour of the traditional barber’s pole. Fortunately, we have now specialised into many more disciplines. Adam Smith would be proud.

Conclusion: I still don’t like going to either.

I can recommend it.

It’s at 156 High Street.

‘We are currently experiencing a shortage of organic milk. [And indeed they were, the shelf was empty]. However, Sainsbury’s XYZ milk is available, and 5p from each pint goes to farmers to help them convert over to organic production.’

Sainsbury’s, here’s a hint: I’m not interested in voluntarily subsidising farmers’ investment in their own production and helping you and them to solve logistical and production problems. Yes, I’m happy to buy organic milk at a price premium, and, yes, I’m aware that most of the difference goes to Sainsbury’s, not the farmers. But asking me to voluntarily pay extra to you and the farmers for no tangible benefit is taking things a bit too far – I’m going to fall on the tight-fisted side of your price targeting.

Chapter 2 of The Undercover Economist contains a good discussion of price targeting, including the usual suspects such as M&S and Fairtrade coffee.

However, for myself, these stalls are becoming commoditised. In the same way as organic produce was rare in supermarkets 10 years ago, and is now commonplace, it appears that more and more such markets are springing up in rural, affluent, areas such as Winchester, as the local economy becomes able to support them and farmers learn how profitable they can be. In fact, I rush round such markets picking up bread and jam, not normally bothered by where it comes from - on the basis that all of it’s bound to be better than Sainsbury’s, right? – and I don’t want to spend the time investigating.

I think this is an illustration of how goods become commoditised as economies grow richer. Personally, I treat the entire market as essentially one homogenous whole – I pick the bread stall with the shortest queue or cheapest prices, not that I’ve been to before. Sure, I’m being boring, but then I’m boring when it comes to selecting my brand of toothpaste too. I’m probably the exception at the minute, but if Winchester ran one of these each day, I wouldn’t be for long.

In any event, if you haven’t been to a Farmers’ market lately, give it a try.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the UK Farmers’ Market Association.

Yet another reason why I’ll be avoiding Sainsbury’s in Winchester in preference to Tesco in the future.

• A massive 222 items in total.
• Numbers next to the items.
• ‘Orders over £12 – Free Curry Samosa’. Hmm, how Chinese. In fact, there is an entire Curry section, including a Chips option.
• The menu has plenty of ‘Improved recipe!’ and ‘New!’. Does this come from the McDonald’s school of menu design?

But it would be unfair to mock this menu without trying it. So I have just finished eating Fried Duck with Ginger and Spring Onion (#69), and Egg Fried Rice (#143). And the verdict: 7/10. OK, but not superb – the rice was a bit dry, and the sauce a bit greasy. They also inadvertently added on one more indicator during the ordering process: I was told it would take an unnervingly precise 12 minutes before it was ready.

So that’s one data point for this scientifically accurate menu/food quality study.

(head out of Fulham Broadway station, turn right onto Fulham Road, and it’s on the left-hand-side of the road after two corners and about 300m).

Disclaimer: I have no connection with this cafe apart from being a client.

Put another way: is there any correlation (real or perceived) between the size of a restaurant menu (measured in number of dishes) and the quality of the food that restaurant sells? For some time I was under the impression that there was an inverse relationship: for the best food, avoid those with large menus. This was based on the premise of combining: the kitchen can cheaply combine a number of pre-prepared meal components (meat, sauce, vegetables, carbohydrate) at the last minute to give the potential for a large number of dishes: but the components are not made freshly: and so the quality suffers.

Recently, though, I’ve started to question this assumption. I’ve eaten at a number of excellent restaurants with huge menus and poor ones with small, promising menus. In both cases, some were cheap, some not so. I don’t know if something has changed in the restaurant industry or if there never was much of a correlation anyway. A Google search doesn’t turn up much research in this area. Is there any hard evidence or empirical data on this?