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Despite the popular stereotype that we're all a bunch of svelte beach-bunnies out here in California, the news hits today that flabber is on the rise for L.A. County's poor preschoolers. While New York City's low-income toddlers are enjoying a three-percent dip in obesity rates, a drop that's consistent with many other big U.S. cities, a new CDC study reports that obesity rates for L.A.'s low-income three and four-year-olds rose four percent in the last nine years, reflecting rates much higher than normal in the U.S. While our car-centric culture takes some of the blame, the study also posits that New York's WIC program pushed healthy lifestyles choices at an earlier point and also cites cultural demographics as a factor. HuffPo explains, "In 2011, about 85 percent of the Los Angeles children in the study were Hispanic, and most were Mexican-American - a group with the highest reported childhood obesity rates, at least among boys." [HuffPo]

California may not possess the ancient romance inherent in a name like The Caspian nor the deep, dank mystery of The Black Sea, but it does have one thing the others are seeing a lot less of these days: caviar. Today, the L.A. Times cites Sacramento as the nation's leading producer of the delicacy, mostly due to pollution, poaching, and over-fishing in its traditional epicenters. Alexander Petrossian, of the famous Parisian caviar-empire, tells the paper, "Wild caviar is gone, and we can all forget about it." Instead, farm-raised sturgeon are the next front in precious fish eggs, with the sturdy, strange fish being raised by the thousands by cultivators like Sterling Caviar in the tiny town of Elverta.

We've always considered Black Hogg kind of like a B-grade version of the original Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, but that still means it's performing twice as well as we ever did in geometry or chemistry. Today, fair-and-balanced Besha considers the critically-lauded Echo Park restaurant, offering some much-needed criticism that's rarely seen in these parts. After succinctly summing up the rise of "dude food," Rodell rips the curtain away from chef-owner Eric Park's illustrious past, exposing his work-experience as "both brief, part-time, noncredited internships" at famous restaurants, and telling us that his inexperience "does explain quite a bit." Offering initial praise for the Brussell sprouts and báhn mì, she finds the fattier eccentricities are "where Black Hogg really starts to go off the rails, where the ingredients and trends of the day are taken to extremes....Much goes outrageously overboard here." A summing up of badly conceived and imperfectly executed dishes follows, with Rodell positing that it "feels as though Park perhaps took his training wheels off a little too early." One star for the spot in one of the critic's best pieces to date. [LAW]

Pichet, the weekend-only pop-up we first introduced you to back in August, appears to be taking over the space at Venice's B1 Breadshop. Yo! Venice! reports that B1 is handing the reigns over to the restaurant, which will grow into a wine bar, bakery, and appetizer-based French bistro concept with 25 seats inside and 10 on a rear patio.