Still, Andrews said, “It’s great to provide the guest with this information,” and she added that once federal regulations are in place, “We will meet the law.”
Until now, restaurants have been faced with varying label laws across the country, from California and King County, Wash., to Philadelphia, New York City and North Carolina — all of which comes at a cost. The Orange County Register reported last December that in complying with state law alone, “Subway has spent $111,000 for new menus at 223 Orange County shops. Newport Beach-based Zpizza . . . said it spent about $120,000 for new takeout menus and two menu boards per store. Daphne’s [a Greek chain], which has 58 locations in the state, spent $500 per store.”
(Brian Cronin/For The Washington Post)
It’s no surprise, then, that the National Restaurant Association endorsed the new federal requirement, one that asks for caloric information but makes exceptions, such as for daily specials. Indeed, a Democratic congressional staffer familiar with the new requirement suggested it is in the industry’s best interests to push for one law that would supersede the others. “This helps business,” said the staffer, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely about this politically sensitive subject. “The Republicans don’t want to deal with the localities and 500 different regulations.”
Not that the law is perfect or even complete; the FDA hopes to finalize its mandate by the end of the year. And some of the original language was vague: A subclause within the health-care bill asked for eateries to provide “a succinct statement concerning suggested daily caloric intake . . . posted prominently on the menu and designed to enable the public to understand, in the context of a total daily diet, the significance of the caloric information that is provided on the menu.”
Who makes the suggestion and how? “A restaurant . . . shall have a reasonable basis for its nutrient content disclosures, including nutrient databases, cookbooks, laboratory analyses, and other reasonable means.” At the moment, the FDA has settled on a compromise statement for restaurants to post: “A 2,000 calorie diet is used as the basis for general nutrition advice; however, individual calorie needs may vary.”
Patrick Basham, founding director of the Democracy Institute and an adjunct scholar at Cato, considers the provision deeply flawed. “One of the reasons I think this is inappropriate is that [menu label advocates] put all the emphasis on the gross caloric number and make no allowance for what it’s made up of. So it doesn’t deal with quality of nutrition. It just deals with calories that are in that product.” In a 2007 working paper for the Washington Legal Foundation that he co-authored with John C. Luik, Basham points out that “based simply on calories, for instance, a glass of milk will show up with more calories than a soft drink, a yogurt with more calories than a bag of chips.” (Diabetics will likewise gain little insight from the newly labeled menus; their concern is less about calories than about sugar.)
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