Christopher Flavelle has a solid article (with video) in Slate today examining New York’s calorie count mandate. He gives a fair representation of both sides, and he ultimately concludes that the hypothesis that forcing nutritional on consumers will make them healthier is far from proven. Once again, I’d add only that the issue is even more complicated than it appears at first glance. To judge the measure’s effectiveness you have to measure not just what people are consuming at the restaurant, but their consumption throughout the day (or over even longer time periods). If people are compensating for their Big Macs at lunch with lighter dinners and breakfasts, then targeting behavior in restaurants is somewhat beside the point. This is the argument made in a paper [.pdf] by economists Michael Anderson and David Matsa.
I also have to take slight issue with this statement:
Yet the absence of unbiased opponents of menu labeling means that lost in the debate over Big Macs and cheesecake has been any serious consideration of whether government agencies ought to be responsible for influencing how many calories we eat.
Since by “unbiased” he appears to mean non connected to the restaurant industry, he should have mentioned the writers at Reason who’ve been hammering away at the issue. Radley Balko, Jacob Sullum, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Steve Chapman have all been making the case against mandated calorie counts. This blog’s been covering it too, with an increasingly long string of posts.
Read Flavelle’s entire piece here.
Guh? This doesn’t need to be about getting people to eat more or fewer calories, it’s about giving people adequate information to decide for themselves what food they want to eat and how much of it they want to it. If frat guys want to use the calorie counts to initiate some sort of fast foot binge-athon, attempting to out intake each other, that’s great!
Well, kind of sad, actually, but you get my picture here. Listing nutritional information helps consumers make the decisions that they want to make, and will allow the market to better reflect actual consumer demands.
It’s good, I like it… even if it means I might get kicked out of the libertarian club. I’ve been introducing myself as a ‘moderate’ libertarian as of late, anyway.
Comment by RumorsDaily — July 5, 2008 @ 4:09 am
“Listing nutritional information helps consumers make the decisions that they want to make, and will allow the market to better reflect actual consumer demands.”
I see your point, but that’s an empirical claim. And if it’s true, we should see significant changes in what people are ordering once the information gets posted. So far, that claim’s not looking too good (though it’s admittedly hard to tell this soon).
Keep in mind that there’s a market for information, too. Subway has capitalized on it by advertising its healthier options. Hardee’s has, too, in it’s own way. Many chains at least highlight their low-calorie offerings. Other chain restaurants make their information available online or in other materials for the people who want it, while keeping it out of sight for people who don’t care or prefer a restaurant experience that doesn’t so blatantly announce its standardized nature. It’s not at all obvious that this multiplicity of approaches is inferior to the one mandated by the city council.
I should add that even if we do see changes, I still think it’s absurd to legislate that restaurants provide nutritional information about every single dish they serve and post them prominently on their menus. If I owned a restaurant and a customer demanded that kind of treatment I wouldn’t hesitate to tell them to bug off. It’s no different when the city council does it.
Comment by Jacob Grier — July 5, 2008 @ 7:22 pm