Eat Your Vegetables
By Jan Larson (06/05/06)
According to a FOX News story [1] a report from The Keystone Center, a public policy group in Colorado, suggests that restaurants shift the emphasis of their marketing toward low-calorie foods, include more low-cal choices on their menus and adjust portion sizes to reduce calories.
Isn’t that special? Just another example of some ivory-tower blowhard telling others what they should do.
Emphasizing low-calorie foods may be well and good, but in the end it won’t work. The immutable law of supply and demand will ultimately prevail and consumers will eat what they darn well want to eat. If one restaurant doesn’t offer what consumers want, they will just go to a restaurant that does. No amount of lecturing from policy group sage will change that. People know what is good for them and what is not and sometimes we simply want to eat what we want to eat.
To be fair, there is little question that obesity is a problem in the United States and there is also little question that marketing is a factor in shaping consumers’ purchasing choices. However, habits change slowly and no matter how many salads and vegetables restaurants may put on the menu, they won’t sell if consumers want burgers.
Burger King doesn’t offer an artery-busting 1230 calorie Triple Whopper just to fill out their menu. While most people would likely pass on that much meat for a variety of reasons, there are those for which a Whopper is just the ticket.
Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, suggests that Congress should give the FDA the authority to require restaurants to disclose the calorie content of their offerings. Once again, a busybody know-it-all wants the government to force a useless mandate on another industry.
The fact is that calorie data is widely available if one wishes to find it. Those that are calorie-conscious know how many calories they consume and those that aren’t don’t care. Forcing restaurants to calculate and disclose numbers that some already know and the rest don’t care about is ludicrous, but that doesn’t stop those that think they know what is best for the rest of us.
Considering that the three most popular items ordered by Americans in 2005 were burgers, fries and pizza, it doesn’t appear that very many Americans are all that concerned about calories. Should they be concerned? Maybe, but ultimately it is up to each person to live their lives as they see fit in a free society.
It is one thing for think tanks or policy groups to suggest practices such as calorie disclosure, but we certainly don’t need any more government intrusion into areas where people are certainly capable of making their own decisions.
Many Americans are all too willing to give up their freedoms. A lot of people don’t think that anti-smoking ordinances violate anyone’s freedom, but they do. Seatbelt laws are restrictions of freedom as are motorcycle helmet laws. Requiring calorie counts or “suggesting” what restaurants should serve or portion size is just another example of well-meaning, but misguided intrusion into our lives and our freedom to live our lives as we choose.
Freedom includes the freedom to make “bad” choices. If people don’t want to eat salads but prefer Whoppers, so be it, and the policy group gasbags should just butt out.
[1] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,197885,00.html
Copyright ©2006 Jan A. Larson All rights reserved.
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