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10 July 2009 4:24 PM
Label Maker
Ezra Klein thinks mandating calorie counts at chain restaurants is a good idea. He writes:
I went to Potbelly's for lunch today. 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.Mmmm. Cookies.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.
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