I was reading the Huffington Post this morning and stumbled upon Nora Ephron’s thoughts about the VP debates and I couldn’t help but share something she wrote that just thrilled me. All of you know that I posted awhile back about the recent attempts of Los Angeles officials to put calorie content on restaurant menus (and you also know how much I love the idea, note the sarcasm:-)). Here are Ephron’s well-written thoughts on the matter.
It reminded me of this thing that’s happened in New York City, which is that all restaurants with more than fourteen locations have to put on the menu the calorie count of each food item. This is an appalling development. It’s hard enough to figure out what you want to order without someone explicitly telling you that you’re going to drop dead if you eat it. But more important, I don’t believe those calorie counts. Who knows how many calories there are in a grilled cheese sandwich? No one, that’s who. But there it is, on the menu, in a grim black and white parenthetical, and it affects you, you can’t help it, and as a result you end up not ordering the thing you wanted and instead ordering some stupid bowl of soup that barely gets you through till three in the afternoon.
Well put Nora! A cheeseburger shout out to you!
Now I’m craving a grilled cheese! Yum.
I understand the thought of some who (for whatever reasons) feel the need to have the calories available. Menus SHOULD have that info…but only IF a patron requests it. I think a note at the bottom of a menu indicating “Calories available upon request” would keep the whole crowd happy
And of course there is already a comment pointing out how important calorie counting is on the first page, completely ignoring the rest of the article. That was to be expected!
Actually this is a great point that I would like to see discussed more often: Regardless of everything else, it IS true that it’s extremely hard – if not impossible – to know exactly how many calories are in something. Even if every single food in the world had a label with nutritional information on it, our daily calorie counts could still be quite wrong.
I think they should have ALL nutritional information available on request. Calories, carbs, nuts, gluten, casein, whatever. But as Ephron says, how do we know they’re not just making stuff up? Obviously if it’s something like nuts, they want to make sure there are no nuts in something before they tell people there are no nuts in it, because they can get sued pretty bad if someone has a severe anaphylactic reaction. But no one will have an anaphylactic reaction to 200 “extra” calories. What’s to stop them from lying out the wazoo about it?
The calories counts on packaged foods are misleading as it is; they’ll tell you this ice cream bar has 300 calories a serving, but there are 2 servings. And when I go out to eat, I’m with Ephron (whose attitude about eating I’ve long admired) I’m not there to have it shoved in my face that what I’m about to eat is going to kill me. And ordering something just because it has fewer calories almost always results in my not being filled up for the day, and needing a snack later anyway, so what’s the point? One more reason to avoid the chains, as if I needed another.
I seem to recall, back in the early 90’s, a “diet” cookie that was advertised as only having 80 calories, and its fiber was supposed to be filling. It was a “good” cookie. Stores were running out of supplies like crazy, and people were stocking up on them. They were delicious, yet NOT sinful.
Then they found out that each cookie was actually about 350 calories. I remember that people were actually MOURNING because of the LIES on the damned packaging!
This all happened within a period of a few months, and it may have just been a regional thing. I wish I could remember more details.
But, hey. It was one tasty cookie!
Yay Nora Ephron!
I almost never eat out (I actually like to cook, and since I live alone I get to cook whatever I want), but when I do, I consider it a “treat.” And you know? It kind of takes the ‘treat” ness away from it a little to be told in big black type “OH NOES 700 CALORIES IN THIS SANDWICH!!!”
Nora is right, if I knew for sure the calories in stuff, I’d probably order something I didn’t really want…or walk out of the restaurant altogether in disappointment. Even if it were my birthday. Even if it was a treat.
Also, there’s the fact that for people who are in recovery from eating disorders, things like calorie counts can be triggering of bad old behaviors.
I’d much prefer to see a “supplied upon request” situation.