In the meantime, initial studies of the effects of menu labeling on behavior and weight reduction produced mixed results, to the delight of the food industry. But, as I wrote here, there will always be plenty of people who decide they don't want the food police telling them what to do, they want to splurge, they'll order more calories for better bang for the buck. That's all fine.



The point of public health is not to dictate personal behavior, however many times the soda industry dresses Mayor Bloomberg as a nanny. The point is to make the default food environment more healthful, and mandatory calorie labeling has an important curbing effect on businesses that don't want to look like they're only offering high-calorie, unhealthy offerings. Starbucks itself made its own default milk choice 2 percent rather than whole, to get ahead of the sticker shock it knew would come once calorie labeling became the rule in New York City.



One of the less discouraging early studies on consumer behavior, conducted by Stanford researchers at Starbucks stores in New York City, which had calorie labeling, and Boston and Philadelphia, which didn't yet, showed that people did consciously order lower-calorie items after the information was in their faces every time they made a purchase. Starbucks didn't take the news as encouragement, though; when I wrote about that and other more-encouraging studies, a spokeswoman implied that the company would wait until national standards were in place before implementing labeling anyplace it didn't have to.



Starbucks isn't the first big player to claim good corporate citizenship by not waiting for the FDA. McDonalds itself announced last year that it would post counts on its menu boards. Panera and Au Bon Pain make calorie counts easy to find in all their stores.



But it's significant. Particularly for the baked-goods-obsessed, like me. Much more important (okay, as important), to my mind, is the fact that the sawdust-seeming baked goods at Starbucks -- even if in 2009 the company laudably eliminated artificial flavorings, ingredients, high-fructose corn syrup, and trans fats -- are about to improve. Radically.



Last year, Starbucks paid $100 million to buy La Boulange, one of my favorite bakeries, in San Francisco, with the idea of using its skill at scaling up production throughout the Bay Area to produce similar-quality baked goods on a comparatively massive scale. I got to document and taste the Starbucks future when writing a long recent piece on the rollout, which has already begun in hundreds of California stores and will reach thousands of stores by the end of this year. Most of the the new La Boulange baked goods, each and every one of which will be served warm, are vastly better than what Starbucks sells now--and many of them are lower-calorie, too. I suspect that's part of what's behind this morning's Starbucks announcement.