Restaurant Nutrition Labeling

This article discusses a recent NYC law requiring chain restaurants with over 15 outlets nationwide to include nutrition information on menus.

Despite whether one thinks this is a good idea, likely to curb people's tendency to order calorie-laden lunches in favor of picking healthy alternatives, or crazy-ass government nannyism, surely one wonders: why only chain restaurants?

"New York City Health Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden said the decision will allow New Yorkers to make informed choices about what they eat. He said chain restaurants were singled out because they have standardized menus. The new policy won't apply to most fine dining establishments, or the thousands of family-owned delis and pizza shops around the city."

Um, standardized menus? Like, standardized across the various outlets of the restaurant so each outlet serves the same items as the other ones? So...wouldn't any stand-alone restaurant kind of already be standardized? Or do they mean that there is a standard prescribed way of making each item on the menu such that the nutrition information can be listed next to each item? Like a Whopper contains one bun, one burger patty, ... and a combination of other things depending on exactly how you order it. How does that all fit on the menu?

And it's not the Chilis and the KFCs of the world that make it impossible to know what kind of nutritional hell their food is. This stuff is readily available on the internet. I'd be more terrified of the local hot dog vendor's chili.

I don't know. It just seems implausible to me that the sole reason Olive Garden and McDonald's and their ilk are singled out for this regulation is that they have "standardized" menus, and that the local shops are spared because their menus are not "standardized." Like, what, a local pizza place doesn't pay attention to how much sausage or how many slices of pepperoni goes onto a medium pizza while Domino's does? Are the kitchen staff of Taco Bell actual robots that can perfectly, uniformly measure out dollops of sour cream and refried beans while the hole-in-the-wall taqueria makes do with illegal immigrant labor?

What would have been a display of real chutzpah would have been requiring all restaurants to "standardize" their menus and make this information available to all customers, either on the menu or on a separate sheet (like so many of the fast food chains already do). But who wants to piss off the local business owners? How much better to make a regulation that puts the national chains at a disadvantage.

For every 10 customers that stop eating 1,000-plus calorie double meat cheeseburgers at a fast food chain once they see in stark print how bad that stuff is, how many will start eating something healthy and how many will start eating at another restaurant, that is not required to communicate this information, where they can order the Giganto-Burger with a level of plausible deniability about the nutritional profile of their meal?

This is probably not their actual intent (at least, for most of the public health people, I am sure it is not). They went after the Big Guys because they're high-profile, convenient to regulate, and easily detestible by the populace due to being Evil Corporations (That Force You to Eat There Through Advertising Voodoo) and not Family Owned Stores (With Employees Who Care). (Although I wonder, no restaurant franchises are owned by families? Aren't some of the NYC Pizza Hut franchises owned by Bob and Betty New Yorker?) I would have more respect for them if they'd be willing to admit this.

In any event, it still strikes me as unfair to require some restaurants to do it and let others not, regardless of the merits of the legislation itself. I recognize that figuring out the nutrition information for a small, stand-alone restaurant could be expensive and awkward, but come on - don't we think that the fucking 21 Club could do it? I mean, these people were able to figure out how to make a burger that people will pay $30 for; they clearly have their act together in a big way.

Of course, I am greatly looking forward to how dramatically this move will reduce overeating of crappy, high-calorie food in NYC and solve the obesity epidemic. I mean, ever since the federal government required nutrition information on labels in grocery stores, people all over the country stopped buying high fat ice cream, frozen pizza, doughnuts, etc. (And I say this as a person who supports the requirement for nutrition information on packaged foods - and am glad that it appears to be on all of the items, and not some select subset of the major brands - and tries to pay attention to what's on them.)