calorie counts

Ezra Klein and Megan McArdle each have odd posts up today about calorie labeling laws. Megan’s post is weird because she says she’s in favor of menu labeling but then goes on to list numerous reasons she thinks it won’t accomplish anything. If it doesn’t work as a nudge why not simply require accessible disclosure rather than prominent display?

Ezra’s post is weird for its suggestion of how calorie labeling will work. He says it may not be because it causes customers to change their orders but because it will induce restaurants to lower the calories of items offered on their menus. Why would they do this unless they anticipate that the information would affect consumer behavior? The only plausible interpretation I can give to his post is that he thinks labeling won’t affect customer behavior at a single visit but might affect how often they return to a restaurant. Calling this an effective mechanism seems like a stretch.

Anyway, the evidence he cites — some menu changes at Macaroni Grill and Denny’s — is a little tenuous. Macaroni Grill was reformatting its menu under new leadership and Denny’s says it was responding to consumer demand for healthier items, not to the law. The changes might be independent of menu labeling legislation.

Even if we grant the assumption that California’s law prompted the changes, that brings up an interesting question: Can the rest of the country free ride on California? The changes Ezra mentions are taking effect nationwide, not just in that state. If California, New York City, and a few other major markets can exert pressure on major chains, the rest of the country may benefit* without having to gaze upon prominent calorie counts or burdening smaller, local chains with the costs of compliance.

Of course it’s also possible that chains could offer different menus depending on whether a jurisdiction requires labeling. If you think that’s a likely strategy then you should also be skeptical that the nationwide changes at Macaroni Grill and Denny’s are a response to the law rather than to other market forces.

*Of course this assumes that the changes really are beneficial. The article cited makes no mention of the taste of the revamped menu items, perhaps with good reason.

While I was away various bloggers once again took up the topic of mandated calorie postings at chain restaurants. Matthew Yglesias went so far as to suggest that the biggest problem with these mandates is that they only apply to chain restaurants. If they’re a promising approach to fighting obesity (I’m skeptical), why not extend them further?

Anyone who’s worked in a creative restaurant or appreciates seasonal food could tell you why. Conor Friedersdorf sums it up nicely at The Daily Dish:

That sounds like an excellent way to create marginally more chain restaurants! There are more than 350 McDonald’s in New York City. There are occasional minor menu changes, but the offerings are relatively static. The calorie labeling cost per restaurant is relatively low… compared to the cost for a single burger joint that has a rotating daily special, occasionally changes bun suppliers, and changes menu items frequently as it tries to experiment and gain a foothold in the neighborhood.

There are a lot of people — and I am one — who love one-off restaurants, specials written on chalk boards because they change everyday, fish dishes that depend on the catch, always changing menus, the use of local in season produce, etc. I do not want marginally less of these things! More broadly, the proliferation of regulations more easily born by large corporations than by small business owners is one reason why so many places in America are overrun with chains — as opposed to singular businesses that provide unique products to consumers and rewarding livelihoods for their proprietors. Of course, every little regulatory burden seems like a good idea on its own. But they all add up. Does Matt really want to make the rest of New York City look a little bit more like Times Square?

At the restaurant where I work the menu changes frequently based upon what’s in season and what unique ingredients our suppliers can provide us with at any given time. This is part of what makes the place so good. It would be financially and practically impossible to send special dishes away for calorie testing. Even making rough estimates base on the ingredients used would be an onerous burden in an already busy kitchen, enough of one to likely tip the scales against the chef bothering to make something new and exciting when a rare fish or succulent fruit is offered by one of our vendors. This is an obvious reason for limiting the mandates to chain restaurants and I can’t imagine why Yglesias, a food blogger, didn’t bother to mention it. (It’s important too not to set the standard for what counts as a chain too low. Recall the small New York pizza chain that spent $10,000 testing its various pies. Have its customers received $10,000 worth of benefits from this testing? How would we prove this?)

Yglesias is also dismissive of libertarian arguments against the mandates. He writes:

Now of course you’ll hear a libertarian argument to the effect of, “if people really wanted to know this stuff the market would respond automatically” which I think you’d have to say was naive at best.

It’s true that it would be naive to think that there’s a perfect market for this information. But it’s also naive to think that there’s no market for nutritional information or that a one-size-fits-all approach is what consumers prefer. Consumers eating at Subway, for example, tend to be interested in the amount of calories they’re taking in. Unsurprisingly Subway caters to their interest by prominently advertising the calories in its sandwiches. In contrast, a person going to Five Guys is likely uninterested in calorie information, at least for that particular meal. So though the chain puts the information online it doesn’t voluntarily post it on its menu boards. This is a market response to consumer demand: The information is available to those who want it but not shoved in the faces of those who’d like to forget about nutrition for a while and enjoy a greasy burger. For many of us the experience of eating at Five Guys would not be improved by being reminded of exactly how many calories we’re consuming.

Yglesias takes the view that increasing the amount of information given to consumers improves the market for food. That’s often true but the reality isn’t that simple. As consumers we can enhance the experience of eating by controlling the amount of information we consider. Buying food directly from the growers at a farmers market enhances the pleasure of eating local produce. Counting calories and knowing we’re being healthy makes having a salad for lunch more enjoyable; counting calories when we’re indulging, whether with fast food or at Per Se, detracts from the meal.

Think of it this way. Imagine a restaurant where when you sit down the server offers you two menus identical in every respect except that one includes a calorie count next to every item and the other doesn’t. Are you being irrational if you choose the menu without the added information or are you rationally choosing the presentation that would make the meal most pleasurable? Obviously the context matters. Progressives like Yglesias want to take that choice away from you.

Advocates of mandated calorie counts like to frame the issue as simply making the information consumers need more readily available. Yglesias is more honest when he quotes Ezra Klein arguing that the point is putting calorie counts where customers can’t avoid them:

Chain restaurants will have to list caloric information on their menus and menu boards. Not behind the desk, or off to the side, or up on the ceiling. Where you can see it. New York, among other cities, has already instituted that policy. Every Starbucks in Manhattan now must post the calories in a MochaFrappaWhatsIt right next to the drink name.

Jacob Sullum rightly concludes that this crosses the line from informing people to nagging them. Advocates of disclosure are welcome to make the argument that the obesity crisis demands such nagging, but they should be forthright about what they’re doing rather than couching the argument in terms of consumer advocacy.

Improvements in information technology are another reason to doubt the merits of forcing restaurants to post calories directly on menus. Websites like Calorie Lab already provide databases of the nutritional information from more than 500 restaurants. As far as I know they don’t have a phone app yet, but they could easily make one (one competitor already has). As smart phones proliferate it will be easier than ever for consumers to access calorie counts in addition to much more thorough nutritional information about the foods they eat. Yet these archaic laws will still be on the books forcing unneeded clutter on printed menus.

If availability of information is the issue there are easy ways to address it. We can require chains to make it readily accessible within restaurants and in standard data formats online. Anyone who wants the information to make healthier choices will be able to get it. I suspect that most opponents of mandated calorie postings wouldn’t object too strenuously to this as long as it doesn’t burden small chains and individual restaurants. What we object to is the notion that the specific number of calories we eat must always be in our thoughts, whether we like it or not.

I’ve noted here before that mandated calorie counts are motivated more by contempt for fast food restaurants and the people who patronize them than by legitimate health concerns. After all, no one is talking about posting health warnings at trendy high end restaurants where duck fat and pork belly are standard ingredients. And how do these places compare? Charles Stuart Platkin visited Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York last year and sneaked out samples of his lunch there for testing in a lab. Here’s what he reports:

The single most caloric menu item was the foie gras, weighing in at 435.4 calories; followed by café Liégeois (basically a gourmet brownie with ice cream), with 185.8 calories. The single least caloric was the buttermilk sorbet, owing in part to its spoon-size portion (23 calories). All told, the nine courses tallied 1,230.8 calories, 59.7 grams of fat, and 101.7 grams of carbs. The total rises to 2,416.2 calories, 107.8 grams of fat, and 203.7 grams of carbs if you include the extras: a salmon amuse-bouche, wine, dinner rolls with butter, and chocolate candies. These might not seem like giant numbers, but that one lunch has 60 percent more fat than the average adult, on a 2,000-calorie regimen, should eat in a day, according to the FDA… It’s also roughly equal in calories to six slices of DiFara’s cheese pizza, ten Gray’s Papaya’s hot dogs, or, it seems appropriate to note, four and a half Big Macs.

Of course, if you can afford to eat at Per Se, you’re by definition smart and fashionable enough to enjoy the meal without being harassed about your waistline.

[Thanks to Barzelay for alerting me to the story!]