A reader responds to my Washington Examiner column about mandated calorie labeling:
Jacob Grier’s concerns hardly amount to a hill of beans. What, precisely, is so prohibitively expensive about publishing simple calorie counts for the ingredients that restaurants use all of the time? (I would like to see fat and carb grams, too, but I suppose that’s too much to ask.) Restaurants spend far more money on less important things, like interior design and mints.
The cost of accurately measuring the number of calories can be hundreds of dollars per dish. For a large chain this isn’t a great burden, but for smaller chains this is significant. Recall the local NY pizza chain that spent $10,000 testing its pizzas just to get measurements of dubious precision. Add into this the costs of creating new menus and menu boards at all locations.
The costs will be high for vending machine operators as well. From McClatchy:
At the National Automatic Merchandising Association, which represents the vending industry, Ned Monroe, senior vice president for government affairs, said that while “we’re not opposed to calorie disclosure, we do have other concerns.”
Among them are potential legal problems _for instance, what if someone attached the wrong label to a vending machine product? He also called the provisions costly.
“The vending industry is under severe economic strain,” he said, and the one-year cost to achieve labeling is an estimated $56.4 million. About 7.5 million vending machines would need product labels, a task that’s generally done by a senior route driver.
Will the gains be worth these expenditures? Cost-benefit analysis is not a strength of calorie labeling studies, but I am skeptical given how ineffective labeling appears to be so far.
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Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, barista, mixologist, and magician in Portland, OR. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Reason Online, The Oregonian, and other publications.
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Calorie labeling is effective if you consider the purpose to be the provision of more information to consumers. If the information is accurate, then the labeling was effective. It’s a binary question.
Of course, if the goal is get people to lose weight (which it shouldn’t be), then it’s obviously going to be more complicated to judge efficacy.
Forcing small restaurants to include calorie labeling seems burdensome. As for vending machines, don’t they mostly sell pre-packaged food with labels already on them? I wouldn’t think the vending machines would be hard hit. Are there a lot of vending machines that sell sandwiches? Maybe I don’t properly understand the industry.
@RumorsDaily: Presumably the issue with vending machines is adding labels to them so that they can be seen from the outside. So that means sending guys out to add labels to all these machines and changing them as necessary. I’m not sure exactly what products this would end up applying to.
As for efficacy, what’s the point of providing more information if it doesn’t result in anything? If you just want more information for information’s sake there’s no limit to what you could require to be disclosed.
People with more information make better decisions. I’ll leave it to them to determine what those decisions might be. It’s not my place to decide if people should be thinner or fatter, eat more calories or less, people can decide that on their own. All I want to do is to give people the tools and information to be able to make informed decisions about their own intake.
Calories are, as far as I’m aware, the most important information regarding food content that can be quickly conveyed in a manner that can be easily evaluated prior to purchase and consumption. I agree that there is a lot more information that could be provided, and I’d love to see that made available as well. Of course, a full nutritional breakdown won’t fit next to each item on a fast food menu board, but it can certainly be posted near the front of the restaurant, or in a section in the back of a menu. And for big chains that can afford to do this, why not do it? And if it’s too expensive for other restaurants, maybe food testing is a service that can be provided by the FDA or state agencies. Basic and accurate information about the contents of the food that we eat should probably be near the top of our priority lists, and it’s an area in which I’m OK spending a few government dollars.
More information leads to better consumers which leads to a more efficient market.
I acknowledge, as always, that I may have to give up my libertarian credentials on this issue.
@RumorsDaily: I’m not sure there’s much point in discussing this again since we’ve done so many times, but anyway…
1) It’s a nice thought that people will use this information to make better or different decisions, but the evidence so far is that they’re making pretty much the same decisions they did before the signs went up.
2) For large chains the info, along with much else besides, already is available. The issue is where it’s posted, not whether or not it’s disclosed.
The thing is, the information is already out there if you want to access it for the most part. There are a million private entities testing foods and posting that info on websites or writing best selling books about it. And it all always comes down to personal responsibility. If you want complete control over what you are eating cook at home. Or be Sally from When Harry Met Sally when ordering and ask for exactly what you want and don’t want. It should be our own personal responsibility to know that green leafy vegetables are better than fried potatoes. And yes there are a lot of hidden calories in restaurant food. So right now when I’m on a fairly restrictive diet I choose not to eat places where I can’t get calorie information (personal responsibility and consumer choice at work) on a regular basis and don’t worry about calories when I on special occasion go out to nice small scale local restaurants I enjoy. Those moments for me are about enjoying good food which is what a restaurant experience should be about. I don’t expect them or want them to have to provide the information for me. I’m making a choice to go there without that exact information.
And going with the it’s not really effective anyway argument, the fact is food at restaurants that aren’t McDonald’s like chains is being prepared and served by people not machines, so it’s likely going to vary in portion size and ingredient amounts to a certain extent from person to person and night to night. Tying yourself to exact numbers written on a page isn’t going to get you anywhere. Again people have the basic information necessary to make smarter choices, and if they can’t figure out that the Mother Lode chocolate cake isn’t the best decision to make then that’s their own problem and knowing whether it’s 700 calories or 2500 calories isn’t going to be the deciding factor.