The Plural of “It Works for Me” Is Not “Let’s Mandate It”
Via Conor, here’s Ezra Klein on why chain restaurants should be required to post calorie counts:
I used to eat lunch at Potbelly’s a lot. I do so rarely now. But my order is the same: Vegetarian on wheat with triple hot peppers, and a bag of Baked Lays. I’m having a bit of a bad day, though, so I made a rare addition: a warm, gooey, oatmeal-chocolate chip cookie.
All quite delicious. When I got back to the office, though, I decided to see what it added up to. First, I looked up the cookie. A solid 450 calories, with 19 grams of fat. Yikes. But what might have actually changed my purchase was knowing the content of my sandwich: According to the nutrition calculator, 525 calories.
The calories in the cookie weren’t startling. But their calories relative to my sandwich proved a bit off-putting. I could pretty much have ordered a second sandwich for the caloric cost. Buying them without the information, it was easy enough to just consider them a side dish. As it happened, the cookie was more like a second lunch. I wouldn’t have ordered a second lunch. Good to know.
You can imagine a lot of marginal changes like that after a menu labeling law goes into effect.
Yes, I can indeed imagine it. But I can also imagine … well, not it, since not everyone is as calorie-conscious or attentive to numbers as the DC blogger set. Indeed, Ezra could have told you this himself if he’d just checked the data before generalizing from a sample size of one:
Results of the present study showed that providing calorie information at the point-of-purchase on a fast food restaurant menu had little effect on food selection and consumption among a sample of adolescents and adults who eat regularly at fast food restaurants. These results contribute to a limited literature on point-of-purchase calorie labeling. To date, seven studies have examined the influence of providing calorie composition information at the point-of-purchase for most food items available in a cafeteria [14,15,17,18,37] or restaurant [24,26] setting. Among these studies, one found no evidence of an effect of calorie labeling on food choices [18]. In contrast, six of the seven studies found some evidence in support of the hypothesis that calorie information may positively influence food choices [14,15,24,17,26], however, results from most of these studies were weak or inconsistent. For example, Conklin et al. found that only 18% of college freshman living on a campus where point-of-purchase nutrition information was available in the dining commons agreed that the available information affected their choice of food [37].
But you, I, and Ezra Klein can all imagine it being otherwise! Which means we need to pass a law! Now get to work, Congress!
Filed under: food, government/law
Based on your post, it seems that your overall point is that legally compelling businesses to truthfully inform consumers about the products that they sell is immoral/ineffective.
So wouldn’t you be opposed to labels on food that we buy at the store? Its the exact same principle and almost an identical situation. Except this time its in a restaurant.
I am not a libertarian, but I can usually see where you are coming from even if I don’t agree with you. But opposing measures that help inform consumers about the products that a business sells? That one escapes me.
Now, of course, if you make the standard libertarian argument of: “well, I agree with you in principle but the costs to our economy/individual liberty are too great” then that would make sense to me. But your argument seems to amount to,”We could compel restaurants to reveal the most basic information about the food they sell to consumers, but its not clear that consumers would be super healthy once they knew, so lets just keep them ignorant.”
My point was only that it is, or at least appears in this case to be, ineffective; morality had nothing to do with it.
If I were, though, to offer a positive argument against mandatory labeling, it would rest much less on abstract appeals to individual liberty than on concerns about posing undue burdens on smaller businesses. Radley Balko wrote a bit about those and similar problems with such laws in this column.
That such measures are ineffective isn’t surprising. That restaurants don’t already do this should be evidence enough that their customers don’t have sufficient demand for it. Of course, some restaurants do put select nutritional info on menus for things that are intended to be healthier.
Right. And Ezra’s example of Baked Lays was revealing in this regard: I can promise you he chose them not because of the fine print on the side of the bag, but because they’re advertised as the healthier option. (Though they taste awful …)
My bias is to think that it’s generally a good thing to provide information that makes it easier for people to make informed choices, even if not everyone chooses to take advantage of that information. In the real world, if “only” 18% of people change their eating habits as a result of nutrition labelling, that’s a fairly large number, considering how hard it is to change people’s behavior.
Also, keep in mind that the study you’re citing has its own set of flaws, which the authors acknowledge. There is a temptation to overstate the significance of a single study, particularly when it supports the point one wants to make.
That’s true, though that 18% figure was only the people who said that the information affected their choices, and there’s good reason to think that there would be a bias in favor of that answer in self-reports; moreover, those people didn’t say how much of an effect they thought there was.
But I agree that the data are less than conclusive; my only point is that Ezra’s anecdatum was worth absolutely nothing, and that we’d obviously want some pretty strong empirical evidence that menu labeling does improve food choices before we made it mandatory.
I should have the right to eat at a restaurant that does not post its calories. In fact, I might even prefer to eat at a local restaurant that cooks its food a little less reliably the same each time than say, Taco Bell does. I mean, it’s pretty easy for Taco Bell to post its calories. They make the same burrito every time. Piece of cake. But down at Paco’s Taco Shop, maybe they have a different Burrito when Paco makes it than when Charlie makes it. Maybe it’s not so easy to post calories. Maybe they buy their foodstuffs from different suppliers and it changes all the time. Maybe reprinting calorie counts on menus is pretty expensive for Paco and Charlie, but not so much for Taco Bell.
I don’t know. Generally, people love to count, weigh and measure, quantify. You could skip calories, or fat grams, or any kind of number that’s actually relevant, and just put something arbitrary like “Fatbelly Points” next to each item, and I suspect that after a period of acclimation diners would begin to remember those numbers and count them up and draw conclusions (some frivolous, but some maybe serious) about themselves or others based on their Fatbelly Points. Klein doesn’t make a very good case that the law would affect food choices. I wonder, though, how such a law would affect general anxiety. Especially of the weight-conscious.
There’s a locally owned mexican restaurant I go to sometimes around Mizzou that has a burrito so big they need two tortillas to make it. If you care at all about calories, you’re not even in the building.