Swap out a few terms in a recent New York Times story about farmers’ attempt to split California, and you might see the IT vs. business saga.

A quote halfway through caught my eye: “The agricultural industry is in this mode that says, ‘You will eat what’s put in front of you,’ and that’s a very condescending view of consumers and eaters. If customers are changing their preferences, the industry needs to change its ways.” Earlier in the story, an old farmer complains, “Those Hollywood types don’t have any idea what’s going on out here on the farms.”

Big Agriculture — affectionately shortened to Big Ag — seems analogous to the enigmatic Big BI. We can map food shoppers to business users, and back again.

The vast, quietly desperate majority settle for pre-packaged solutions, whether frozen dinners or standard reports. Most see little reason to change, or else they hate it all but see no way out. Locally grown produce? New ways of looking at the data? Yeah, right.

Some turn to alternatives like LucidEra, DataSelf and Birst, the on-demand chefs. They’re for people with food in the kitchen, of any origin, who don’t know what to do with it all or don’t have time.

Then we have the do-it-yourselfers. Those who insist they “need nothing fancy” prefer Excel, perhaps with the Veg-O-Matic add-in for slicing and dicing.

What to some food users is “fancy” is to others a cause to celebrate, and tools like Tableau Desktop and Lyza stay as close as the chef’s knife.

Tableau users are the Alice Waters of the data crowd: foraging local and remote sources, tasting, combining and trying out new concepts every day on friends in the kitchen and often at dinner parties. To them, data’s more than food, it’s the fire, too.

Lyza users also forage for eventual presentation, but at heart they may be more like old-time homesteaders. They thrash, mill and grind to extract the best they can get. They’ll wallow in muddy data if it means finding something better there. They’d rather do that than let someone else do it for them.

Meanwhile, back at Big Ag, the old farmer’s been out at shopping malls testing support for his initiative to split the state in two. He says, “I’m an old hound dog. If I’m barking up a tree, I want to know how many squirrels are up there.” I think he’s barking at data, not food.

I ran into one of my first and best TDWI friends this morning. Even after all this time, he cannot yet be named publicly and, perhaps because of that, is free with musings on the industry and other things. We’ve tentatively code-named him Tiberius, after a meeting room at Caesar’s Palace.

This morning he’s thinking of a New Yorker cartoon. Two men at a bar are talking, and one says, “Are you just pissing and moaning, or can you verify what you’re saying with data?”

Our conversations are not always fact based, but we do our best. This morning we did it over coffee and, in his case, a crepe, and in my case a yogurt parfait.

Oh, please, he says of the Republican response to Obama’s fine speech last night. Oh, please, “let’s get the stupid out of the discourse.” Bobby Jindal complained of research money for honeybees, as if the rationale for it were not fact based. Honeybees sound silly, and he relishes a teenage-like snicker, with no mention of the peril to agriculture. Let him eat stupidity.

“People do things differently,” Tiberius sighs. “Even this,” he says holding up a USA Today, “is probably too complicated for [the Republicans].”

Finally, it’s the season for rational problem solving, something faith-based Republicans have forgotten about. Too bad they’ve left so much wreckage.

Our shared fascination with con artistry came to mind. That may seem to explain our tolerance for Vegas, but it does not. We actually like the camp—for a few days. We’re both going home today.

Almost the same moment I read that for the fourth year in a row executives rate BI the top tech priority in 2009, I hear Tableau Software’s news: last week saw the most downloads of trial software ever. “Not by a little, by a lot,” says marketing and PR VP Elissa Fink.

The poll of Australian executives, by Gartner, also indicated that purchases faced more scrutiny. The press release mentions “CFOs doing final negotiations on pricing and maintenance.” I assume that Australian business is not significantly different from U.S. business.

Tableau, of course, lands like a mint on most CFOs’ pillows. Remember the old Apple ad for the first iMac, which describes the “three steps to installation”: Step one, unpack. Step two, plug in. There was no step three. Tableau needing “maintenance”?

Fink can’t explain the surge. There’s been no recent change in marketing. Does the Gartner poll help explain it? Possibly.

I’m sorry if this sounds like marketing. I happen to like Tableau’s product, not to mention their foodie-friendly user conferences.

Let’s see what other new-wave, light-on-their-feet products might have news next week at the TDWI conference in Las Vegas.

Among the visarazzi— data visualization’s foot soldiers, scientists and evangelists—”chart junk” is a no-no. If you make a bar chart about trees, for example, don’t for god sakes actually show drawings of trees. That would be silly.

However, the visarazzi probably don’t mean to prohibit chart junk food.

Tableau VP of marketing Elissa Fink has made what we might call a mashup. She presents data with pictures in Tableau Desktop. The fact that mashed potatoes has a high ratio of fiber to fat, for example, is appropriately and artfully augmented with a slim photo.

What a purist would reject as chart junk actually adds to our understanding by reaching us on the level at which we actually know food and intuit its truest qualities. Food is more than data. It is sensation, association and even celebration. The pumpkin pie photo, for example, reminds the analyst of the nourishing fiber that makes itself known in every mouthful. Pumpkin pie, in fact, packs far more fiber than the lowly brussels sprout.

Besides, what harm does that tiny photo do to the chart, especially a chart that appears just once a year?

So go ahead, trust the data. Have that second slice.

Those of us in the tech world who shun jargon may forever remain an underclass. We may never rise to the mainstream, where today tech-centric vendors rule. So I’m delighted when I meet another one of our clan who declares proudly his rejection of tech-speak.

Don Farber, vice president of sales and marketing at KnowledgeSync, says that to reach business customers, you have to use words they understand. For many buyers in the mid-market, that means avoiding any jargon at all.

Here’s how he orders a steak: “I ask for ‘pink in the middle.’ When the waiter asks me, ‘Rare?’ I say, ‘I don’t care what you call it, just give me a steak that’s pink in the middle.’”

We have to be careful, though. Some buyers in the mid-market watch for tech words as if it were a secret handshake. One insightful Datadoodle reader read about Farber’s approach last week and posted a reply that began like this:

This is so true. And it cuts both ways. Larger midsize companies have IT teams who are knowledgeable about BI, and if you don’t use all of the most proper complex jargon with them, they think you’re a lightweight solution that doesn’t do what they need or, worse, that you’re a team of idiots who just happened to create what they wanted the first time…

Take that, Strunk and White (Elements of Style).

Everybody’s talking about the recession, but that’s just theory at the buffet line. There, mini-recessions come and go. One day it’s not-too-bad pork loin, and the next day it’s lukewarm hot dogs.

Those hot dogs, served for lunch last Monday at Sage Summit in Denver, came on the slowest day. My last nourishment was from Southwest peanuts hours before. So I took not one but two hot dogs, but then found just mustard, catsup and relish. That’s a downturn.

Things picked up on Tuesday. Shoppers arrived. For lunch, some kind of tasty chicken. Several department heads who came by on Monday returned with good questions. Upturn.

On the flight home, I had peanuts again—with a full can of orange juice. Upturn before the descent.

This week it’s turkey, and then around we go again.

The junk food of data visualization has found a home. Pie charts show up everywhere, just like trans fats. Visual analysis expert Stephen Few condemns them, and I’ll bet Tableau Software designers held their noses the day they added pie-chart templates.

Now in Philadelphia near college campuses, you get pie charts with your pepperoni. The Economist, with help from BBDO Worldwide, has sponsored infographed pizza boxes. Ponder “arable and permanent crop land by country” and “mushroom exports to the U.S.” as you chew.

The charts do look tasty. Did you know that the U.S. has 12.3 percent arable and permanent crop land? Percent of what, I’m not sure. Did you know that India has almost as much as the U.S? That’s what the figures say; I couldn’t tell which of the slices was bigger.

At participating pizza joints.

Text analytics was one of those things I heard about every so often. Like so many terms in this business, the term comes out of a speaker’s mouth or PR person’s press release only to blow away. There’s no story, no context, nothing to chew on.

Then came a press release at BI This Week with a rare combination: surprise and concreteness. It said text analytics would help with food safety. I’m all for food, but I had no idea what text analytics had to do with it.

I emailed UK-based Linguamatics, publisher of the nifty tool they call I2E. What’s this I hear about food? Product manager Phil Hastings, ready to call it a day in Croatia, called to explain the features to me, barely post-breakfast and not fully verbal. I2E was indeed a powerful little thing, but I still didn’t get the food angle.

It wasn’t until I got William Hayes on the phone that things started making sense. He’s director of library and literature informatics at pharmaceutical research company Biogen Idec. They don’t do food, but close enough.

If you think the Sunday New York Times is enough for one day, consider what the research community has to bear. Hayes says, “If you’ve got 20 million articles to read, where do you start?’

“The research industry works under a tougher knowledge model than terrorist intelligence gathering,” says Hayes. “Our ability to tap that ocean of literature is like dropping a line into the ocean for fish.”

In general, a scientist can read 150 to 200 full text journal articles a year, he explains. A curator can review about 100 abstracts a day “for a few days before you start going nuts.” Text mining is the only way to keep up with the ocean of literature produced each year.

The food industry fries potatoes, but it also has to keep a lookout on research.

TNO information analyst Fred van de Brug told me the acrylamide story: Most people in the food industry missed the first warning. Scientists had published a discovery in 2000 about a possible carcinogen known as acrylamide, which can develop in starch-rich foods like potatoes as they are fried. By the time the warning finally hit the public media in 2002, millions of people became frightened, perhaps unnecessarily. Text mining would have given food processors time to head off a crisis.

I2E is more agile than standard text mining. You can learn to use it in a few hours. Hayes told me, “If you can remember bits of grammar and have some concept of what you’re researching, it’s a piece of cake.”

It’s a story in progress for BI This Week.

Do the TDWI San Diego organizers think we’re on a diet? Are attendees and exhibitors no longer paying full fare? I try, but I can’t quite forgive the elimination of hot breakfast.

You may recall the spread that once honored us: chafing dishes full of scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, potatoes, biscuits alongside gravy, crisp red seedless grapes and fans of sliced honeydew and cantaloupe. Also three kinds of muffins, cold cereal and hot cereal, too. All were continually refilled to encourage bountiful first and second helpings.

At this show, sadly, there are no hot chafing dishes, there is no melon, there is no cereal of any kind. There are just muffins and, far off to the side as if to retard consumption, a tray of bagels.

Though I cannot imagine why TDWI would risk everlasting shame in Chowhound or Yelp, I do know one thing. Muffins alone don’t cut it. Bring back the hot breakfast.

Several hundred practioners of the many aspects of business intelligence are gathering here in San Diego for this week’s TDWI conference. They know how to clean data, enable fast searches, design insight-accelerating tools and other wonders—and yet no one yet has a reliable metric to score restaurants. We still have to go out and sniff.

You’re now screaming at me: ask your concierge! I did. She sent me to Oceanaire, the Blue Point and several others. But all looked too slick and none smelled good.

Other readers are screaming different advice: look at Zagat, at TripAdvisor, at Google Earth! I did. The online reviews are all mixed—and which ones do I believe? What does the average rating really mean? The written reviews reflect mostly pretension and middle-class angst. Phrases like “they treated us like royalty” too often lead to evaluations like “cooked to perfection.”

This part of Web 2.0 doesn’t work. Nor did it work as Publishing 2.0, or whatever we might have called it back when Zagat ran on paper ballots and hardcopy. Hey, you clever people, create a reliable indicator for restaurant chemistry that I can compare with my own quantified preferences so I can predict my reaction.

I ended up at Candelas. No wait, no drunks, and no obsequious waiter. Just a nice place with delicious food.