Okay, I’m reading this…and then remembering how at my last trip to a restraunt (not a fast food place) my purchasing choice was influenced by the health information on the menu. There were items that I could just not bring myself to buy, that I easily might have if not for the health information.
So. At least one human is influnced by this information. Am I the only such human, alone in the world in my ability to be influenced this way? Perhaps. What do you think?
Also worth noting, I didn’t flee the restraunt. I simply selected a smaller, cheaper item on it. Presumably if somebody has gone to all the effort to go to McDonalds, they’ll still buy something. Though I can’t entirely discount that some people might elect to go somewhere else instead (where they’ve seen better selections) the next time they go out.
And then, after all this thought, I noticed that you wrote “it’s just going to cost money for no good reason”, which undermines everything I wrote, because in my opinion “to scare people away from unhealthy food” is emphatically not the reason we’d be putting the information on the menus. The reason would be “to assist people in making informed decisions about what they eat, if they so desire”. And that reason is being served by putting the nutrition info on the menus, even if not a single person changes their purchasing behavior as a result.
And Angel of Doubt? First: :D, and second: if I were supreme dictator I would rule “do-it-by-X-date … six months out”.
The study may be too soon to do any good. All the study showed was that after the calories were put on the menu, after a certain time, people didn’t change their habits
Look at smoking, the warning were put on cigarettes in the 60s. TV advertising stop decades ago, but it was a gradual process where people stop quitting. The numbers of smokers has gone down steadly but slowly.
Because the information is ALREADY available to the public, if they really want to know. A quick Google search gives me calorie information on a Big Mac…in fact, do a Google search and you can get a calorie count on an entire Big Mac meal! What you are asking for is something extra here, and I don’t see the purpose, since the info is available to anyone who actually cares about it.
Honestly, I can’t get too passionate about requiring information on the menus. I can get pissed off about the near-inevitable next step. So, nutritional-information supporters, convince me that your support is more than a case of this.
I’m in a restraunt where there’s no nutrition info. I do not have it memorized. I have no phone. What do I do:
Leave the restraunt and go look it up, and in the meantime go hungry.
Buy crap I wouldn’t otherwise buy.
I know why the stores might want to create this scenario. Why do you?
Bullcrap. If I make something arbirtarily and unnecessarily hard to access, and you therefore do not get it, that does not mean you don’t want it. It just means that you were deterred.
I could use similar logic to justify doing nearly anything, by saying that because you didn’t do what it takes to stop me, that you must have wanted me to do what I did.
I care about calories, a little. I don’t care about poor people at all. (With the exception of myself of course.) My position on this is that I just think that it’s not too much to ask for a restraunt to go to the nonexistent effort to put useful information in the store*, and it’s ludicrous, irrational, and unreasonable to claim that people should be required to do additional research to ‘earn’ the right to make an informed decision.
I can accept the McDonalds approach of having a separate poster with the info (in tiny print) in the store, though I do think it’s cleverly planned to minimize impact on consumer behavior. Not all restraunts have nutritional posters, though.
Sorry, not the same. So a consumer must now purchase a computer, pay for internet access, and THEN they can know what they are eating? That sounds less than optimal to me.
Or, a person can take an extra trip to somewhere that already has computers, in order to know what they are eating?
Stay home…it’s the only way to be sure. Seriously, if you go out to a fast food place you SHOULD pretty much know what to expect, assuming you are an adult. If you go to some other kind of restaurant then all I can say is that you do what the rest of us do…you takes your chances and rely on the Pure Food and Drug laws (as well as other ordinances) ALREADY IN PLACE.
Why do I what? Disagree with this silly new law or whatever it is? Because, well, it’s silly. No other nefarious reason.
Related question: there are some restaurant chains that refuse to release any nutritional information about any of their menu items at all. What about them?
Not very effectively, it doesn’t. Wait until next year, when they roll out the requirement that you read the nutritional information for any item on the menu that you plan to order, and they won’t let you order it unless you pass a written, proctored quiz on the information in the chart.
That’s a lot of proctors who are going to have to be brought into the workforce. . .
Hey, you know what, I think I’ve just solved the country’s unemployment crisis! GO, ME! :D:D:D
In these modern times one can visit a place called a ‘library’, if one is among the vast minority of people who have no internet access or no cell phone. There are several alternative avenues to gaining this information as well, but these new fangled ‘library’ thingies are pretty much everywhere.
If they REALLY want to know, and they haven’t picked up a rough idea in the last 30 odd years of approximately what’s in fast food then…well, yeah. Conversely fast food places could be forced to provide information that is already available and that (as a WAG) only 1 or 2 percent of the people actually want it (and can’t get it any other way than to go to a library to get it) when ordering that Big Mac and fries with the extra large diet coke.
You are trying to solve a ‘problem’ that doesn’t need to be solved, and that only folks like those on this message board give a rats ass about. Most folks who eat at McDonald’s either don’t care or already know approximately what they are getting themselves into…or both.
IMHO, the information is there for anyone who wants to find out, and nothing additional should be required. As long as the restaurants are complying with health and safety requirements, Pure Food and Drug laws, etc etc, then they have ALREADY fulfilled their obligations to the public.
Bullcrap yourself. I just timed myself, and it took 15 seconds to find the nutritional information for a Big Mac (and 20 seconds to find the nutritional info for a Whopper), including typing in the url and waiting for the website to load. If you don’t care about calories enough to spend 15 seconds looking up the information, then you don’t care about calories.
Then, I suspect that you’re in the minority.
Well, that’s life. If you want to make an informed choice on just about anything, you’re going to have to do some research.
As opposed to the current plan, where they don’t update their menus when they introduce new products.
Oh wait, they do.
Anyway, I live in China and the fast food restaurants do put calorie counts on the packaging of their products. I find this very informative. More than once I chose to eat half my serving after learning it contained my calories for the day. If it were on the menu, I would have probably avoided ordering these specific items.
Specifically, I find the information because it’s not always apparent what items on the menu are high-calorie and which are more reasonable. I know that fast food in general is going to be high calorie.
But, when ordering at Subway, who would know that a foot long teriyaki chicken sandwich has 200 more calories than the roast beef? Or that a six inch spicy italian has the same calories as a foot long turkey breast sandwich? Having that information handy makes it a lot easier to make smart choices. And no, I’m not going to go to the library and look up nutritional information every time I want to grab lunch.
Is it “nannyism” to require companies to list ingredients and nutritional information on packaged food, like we do? Is there anyone who would like to get ride of that? Most of us find that information useful and informative. Giving this information for restaurant food is basically the same thing.
Or, if there are enough people who feel like I do, we can use the power of our votes in a democratic government to institute measures that help us make informed choices.
I’d be very surprised if even if they didn’t have the information avaliable to the public, that fast food chains didn’t already have nutritional information about what they sell. Printing up the materials is no great biggy, since they print up new materials pretty darn often anyway. And “the labor involved in putting the information on the menu’s”? They’re not carving blocks for inking.
Not to a greater extent than would be the change normally. Structure, design, layout - really, the only thing that’s guaranteed to be on there is the list of food and a logo or two, and even then they aren’t going to be in the same place. Where does the great expense come in? They’re not going to be charged oddles more for using up an extra iotath percentage of a printer cartridge per menu.
On this, however, I agree. I have the sneaking suspicion that while the actual cost to company will be a tiny bit more, if that, the cost to consumer will go up by the amount you are envisioning.
I’m not convinced that this is the real reason behind the proposed law. The law isn’t there to help us make informed decisions, it’s to help those people make informed decisions. And if the law passes and those people don’t change their decisions, well then maybe it’s time to ban McDonald’s from advertising, or maybe to tax those wrong decisions. Maybe it’s time to talk about banning those bad decisions (like trans fats) outright.
I’m not sure why you would continue thinking this, when there is not a single shred of reason to believe it.
Numerous people have already explained why they personally prefer having nutritionally information easily accessible on the menu because it would help them, personally, make decisions. Many of us included specific examples of how and when that information would help us make decisions for ourselves about what we want to eat.
Zero people have said they think it’s important for any other person to have that information. Nobody mentioned a single other person. Shockingly for a thread about food, no buzzwords like “childhood obesity”, “diabetes epidemic”, “fatties”, etc. have even come up in this thread. Indeed, the only person who mentioned those people was arguing against this measure, stating that it didn’t actually influence those people’s eating habits. Unsurprisingly, few of us were impressed, since our argument was not about those people, but rather, our own choices.
But go ahead and think what you like. Liberals want to ban milkshakes! Leftists want an anti-french-fries nanny state! We are coming for your donuts!
Honestly, I have no idea why this would even be posed as a left-right issue. I just want to know what I’m buying without having to do anything too complicated at all. Nothing political about it- it’s just something I would find convenient.