Restaurant Calorie Postings
Scene 1: “Oh my gosh! This pizza has a TON of calories!” ” I know, I had no idea that each time I ordered this I was eating that much. But even the salad says it has a lot of calories.” “No way! Gross! There’s no way I can eat that many calories.” This was the conversation I heard filling a popular restaurant as I made my way to my own table. As I sat down and opened my menu, I noticed what all the distress was about: next to each menu item bellowed a number. This restaurant had implemented the recent California law requiring all restaurants with 20 or more units to display the calorie count of all food items on menus and indoor menu boards, as well as to provide brochures with nutritional content information. Now, instead of being filled with friendly conversation about this and that, this restaurant was filled with frantic and guilt-ridden contention about how many calories were in what foods.
Scene 2: “Wow! Hmmm, I guess I’ll have the skinny vanilla late with no whip cream. Small please” chimed a sheepish customer in front of me. “Wow. That’s a sign of self-control” retorted the barista receiving her order. “Well, the calories do help” responded the customer with a tilt of her head that spoke guilt meshed with unfulfilled longing.
Scene 3: “Uhhg! I’m so sick of seeing these darn calories everywhere! Let’s go somewhere else. I’d rather not know.” I watched a couple of young women walk out of the deli in search of solace from blaring calorie postings.
These scenes are just three of my many recent encounters since the installation of the new California law requiring restaurants with 20 or more units to post the calorie content of each menu item. The government’s attempts to educate people about nutrition and to reduce obesity is honorable. Certainly, obesity is a serious problem in our country and attempts at improving health is certainly respectable. However, posting calories on menus seems to be going about it the wrong way. In fact, it is my belief that this approach may actually be more harmful than helpful.
Most people are generally aware of how to eat. Basic food groups and healthy nutrition is typically common knowledge. There are circumstances when basic education about how to eat well is greatly needed and beneficial. But generally speaking, lack of knowledge is not the issue when it comes to obesity. Simply knowing the nutritional content in a bag of potato chips does not stop an emotional eater from chowing down. Deep emotional undercurrents, cultural ambiguities, and a hedonistic society all factor into the obesity epidemic in our nation. Our culture as a whole is sick, and posting calories next to menu items is not going to heal us. In fact, it just feeds into our already existing paradigm that we are to monitor internal realities according to external standards and measures.
Long before we had science to tell us how many fats, carbs, and proteins were in a unit of food, people managed to eat and survive. Humans managed to sustain healthy diets without knowing what the heck a “calorie” is. In our day and age, we are fortunate enough to have scientific information to tell us how our bodies can run optimally. However, we are also a society that has moved away from intuitive eating and towards routinizing our eating according to external standards. Less is more; fewer is better. We use numbers, tables, charts, graphs, breakdowns, and measurements to tell us how we are doing.
Restaurant calorie postings feed right into this movement. Instead of ordering according to internal hunger cues, a customer is subliminally encouraged to order according to calorie count. Instead of listening to our innate appetites, we listen to an objective measure. As a society, we are moving away from our internal regulators and towards external regulators. We are being trained as a society to disregard our internal reality where our feelings, desires, and subjective experiences reside. People with eating disorders are experts at living life from the outside in; they have taken the cultural ideal to the extreme. Posting calories in restaurants is merely feeding into this phenomena (no pun intended). It seems that our societal culture is almost training us to become disordered eaters.
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