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| No | 54% | 927 votes | Total: 1729 votes | |
| Yes | 46% | 802 votes |
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Add to FavoritesNo, restaurants should not be required to list food's nutritional content on their menus. I'd like to think that most people have the capacity to work out their own menu choices using their own criteria. If they don't, they're probably unlikely to understand a nutritional label. Therefore, legally requiring such labels is not rational.
More to the point, the question is indicative of a disturbing assumption, pervasive and largely unquestioned in our culture. And that is: We are not responsible for our own choices. This is the real issue behind the question of coercive food labeling, and it is an important one.
When did companies/institutio ns/objects/drugs and most recently, restaurants, become responsible for our own poor decision-making? When did saving us from ourselves become acceptable fodder for legislation? Perhaps it is an inherent part of a free society, a dialectic of progress that cannot be avoided. But the result is the winnowing away of our personal freedoms. And rather than being vigilant against it, we have become mostly numb to it. This is the only explanation for how a topic like obligatory nutritional labels on menus could be debated by sober thinkers in an intellectual (or legislative) arena.
Here is a story that I think illustrates my point nicely. Nearly twenty years ago, smoking was the do-gooder target of choice. I was working in a factory then, and as hard as it is to believe today, we could smoke while we worked. And nearly everyone did. One day, rumors started circulating that it was all coming to an end and sure enough, it did. First, the company allowed smoking only in the break room. Then, it separated the break room into smoking and non. Eventually, this went away as well. If you wanted to smoke a cigarette, the company told us, you would have to get in your car and drive off the property.
Now, I don't necessarily think it's bad to segregate smokers. Secondhand smoke is unpleasant. But to make smokers leave the property? This was outrageous! The most unsettling aspect of all, though, was the smokers' indifferent attitudes to the whole business, summed up by one smoker's quote, burned forever in my memory because it galvanized the core issue for me: "I should quit, anyway." Well, of course you should quit, I thought. It's a dirty, extremely unhealthy habitbut isn't that for you to decide? I was not a smoker, but the rampant lack of outrage bothered me so much, I began campaigning for smokers' rights. "What's next?" I would ask. "Outlawing donuts in the break room because they're bad for you too?" I thought it was a good analogy; outlawing donuts was so silly, it would make people see that it was no longer about smoking, but about their diminished power of choice. It was a short-lived effort: I was met with flat looks and, for the most part, complete disinterest.
Well, we all know how that story ended. Smokers' ostracism is now almost complete. Whether you hate smokers and are glad for this is beside the point. The point is that smokers relinquished a personal freedom, one that was important to them, without a fight. And now we are on the verge of having donuts outlawed.
Do you see the correlation? The same thing is now happening with food. A movement has been afoot in recent years to regulate foods considered unhealthy. There have been numerous bills introduced around the country to have trans fats "outlawed." One has even passed, I believe, somewhere in New York, making the use of trans fats a crime. This is horrifying to me.
Legally requiring nutritional information on menus is part of this movement. If restaurants voluntarily supply this information, that's well and good. But to obligate them to do so by force of law is wrong. It places the burden on the institution and follows a dangerous precedent. The anti-smoking regulations in the eighties created widespread anti-smoking sentiment in the nineties. This in turn made it possible for states to sue tobacco companies and win the largest financial settlements ever granted in U.S. courts. All for people who took up smoking completely of their own volition. Regulation of unhealthy food will have similar results.
Oh, wait: it already has! Remember the obese man who sued MacDonald's? Or, in a related vein, the infamous hot coffee lawsuit? Although most of us find these lawsuits appalling, we grimace, we shake our heads, and then we get on with our lives, for it doesn't really affect us, does it?
It is a very slippery slope indeed.
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Yes
I remember when my Mom was first diagnosed with diabetes. Life was extremely rough for her and local restaurants did nothing to make it any easier. She was placed on a low carbohydrate, low sugar diet to bring her sugar levels back under control. For weeks she stuck to her diet, alone and at home.
She lost a lot of weight and brought her sugar down to safe levels but life was still a nightmare for her. She loved to eat out on weekends and no longer felt that she could. "What if this has too many carbohydrates?" she would ask my Dad, a Chiropractor. "Does it contain sugar?" would be her constant question to the waitresses. Some waitresses had a bit of an idea while others had no clue.
Mom became paranoiac of eating out as no restaurant provided a menu with nutrition information. Her love of food and trying new things became a never ending horror story. Finally she decided she would just drop us off at the restaurant and come back later for us. Dad and her nutritionist struggled to help Mom but it was as if there was no hope for her.
She and dad purchased and read every book on diabetes on the market. Soon they stumbled on one idea, vinegar. Vinegar actually helps block carbohydrates from becoming sugar. Little by little mom returned to restaurants, ordering a side of vinegar at every meal. This however was not the best solution either. In her favorite restaurants, Chinese, the language barrier made it extremely difficult to order vinegar. In other restaurants she would get strange stares from the waitress. Mom is going to restaurants a little more lately but is still extremely uncomfortable about it.
If only menus would carry the nutrition information on them then people like my Mom could comfortably re-enter the world of the living. My friend owns a restaurant chain and before his chain became famous he would have recipe boxes on each table to inform his guests of the content of each item on the menu. Now, I am not saying restaurants should go through the trouble of providing menu boxes. I understand how tough that would be and know that is why Alex pulled them from his tables. However, couldn't restaurants list the main ingredients that people who have medical problems have troubles with? For example; sugar content, fat content, carbohydrate content, cholesterol content and salt content. I am not saying that a restaurant should list everything right down to the vitamin and calorie content but these few items would be important to diabetics and heart patients.
Our population is growing older now and Americans are a very overweight culture so it should be expected that a large number of people would need and want this service. I do Pampered Chef and also give cooking classes at our local community center. Every time I teach about my menu selection I make sure everyone knows if there is say nuts in it or sugar in it or butter. That way anyone who has an illness can feel comfortable in passing up on what I am cooking. However, I never send the people who pass up my food home empty handed. I take them aside and ask what is wrong with them. If a person says, "I'm diabetic." or "I can't eat fat because I have had heart problems." I sit with them and help modify the recipe so it will meet their dietary needs. That way they can use what I taught them and apply it to the new, modified recipe right in the comfort of their own home. I accommodate my clients and I am a very busy Mom, housewife, writer and cook. If I can take the time to care then I certainly would think the hospitality business could as well.
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