It should be required by federal law...

I can't afford to eat out that much, so I don't get frustrated. When I do eat out, it's a treat, and I can get the nutrition I need by identifying the ingredients myself. If you want to eat healthy, you should stay home and cook it yourself.

...To have printed "Nutrition Facts" for every menu item in every restaurant in the country. It should be required to have it available either in print, at the front of the restaurant, or online for anyone to read. Does anyone else get as frustrated as I do when they go out to eat?

I think they should because a lot of people have allergies to things or may have illnesses where they NEED to know what they are putting into their bodies, and if they can't find out that information they have limited choices of where they can go out, and may miss out on fun family dinners if they can't eat at that restaurant.

If you're allergic to something you should always inform that nice server who takes your order. They then go tell the chef who makes sure everyone knows so you don't go into anaphylactic shock in the restaurant. Just because your allergy isn't in the dish you ordered there is this thing called cross contamination.

Oh, hells no. I'd rather take my chances on calories and go to a real restaurant (with a real person making my food who can make decisions based on what products look the best that day) over an assembly-line chain place (where they just dump pre-measured, bagged, frozen cr@p on my plate) any day of the week.

As much as I love the eat at local, non-chain restaurants, that's difficult when I'm counting calories. The lack of nutritional info can be a real deterrent. I'd love to see it available at every restaurant, not just the chains, and I'd love to see it inside the establishments, not just on their websites. At worst, it should be available in writing upon request.

I do have a vague idea for a business that would help small restaurants build basic websites that contain nutrition estimates for everything on their menu. I think to entice restaurants to participate, it would have to be fairly inexpensive and easy to maintain. I haven't figured out how to make that work though.

If something like this were offered using the SaaS model, since smaller businesses most likely won't have their own infrastructure, it would still cost "something". Servers don't run on marshmallows and rainbows. Even if the service itself were cheap, there is also the man hours to input data, and keep the data current, since we won't have any pretty system integration. This also makes the assumption that the end product would be "super easy to use and totally intuitive!!!". From the perspective of the business, a 3rd party system is a big headache in just about any manner of implementation, SaaS or otherwise. Pretty much any business person is going to ask you "where is my value in that?".

There's also the potential litigation aspects. This horrible idea for a law would be a hot mess.

Expensive? it would take about 2-4 hours (depending on menu size) to sit down with a menu and go through every item and calculate the totals. Then you could print out 1 copy for each table and laminate it and it could cost less than 50 bucks.

There is no excuse not to let your customers know whats in what they are eating.

1.) Ummm don't go out to eat.....if you are that concerned

2.) just eat it - that's why you go out to eat - to indulge yourself

I work at a restaurant and we change our menu every couple days - so now we have to research everything that's in it? every other day - that's ridiculous

Too right!!! That's what my dad does in his nutrition and allergen lab. You cannot just rough estimate nutritional information for public knowledge, it is an exact science and there are specific laws around food labelling and standard procedures.

I've worked in the industry for most of my life and it's safe for you to assume whatever you ordered is loaded with salt, fat, and calories. Do you really wanna know? You might think you do, but you don't. Trust me you don't. I was at a restaurant a few years ago where the best seller on the lunch menu was the grilled chicken Caesar salad. Mostly ordered by women assuming they were making the healthy choice. It had well over 1000 calories and a days worth of sodium. Don't expect to eat out and eat healthy at the same time. Do you know why restaurants don't normally voluntarily do this? Same reason you don't step in front of a speeding bus.

You seem to be assuming that in states where this was implemented that the nutritional information provided was accurate.

I assume when the Cheescake Factory claimed their blackened chicken sandwich had more calories than most bacon cheeseburgers, and more sodium than one should eat in a day, they weren't lying.

My question is specifically what mechanism..

It's spelled out in the link I provided before how California implemented this.

Oh goodie, we're going to model the federal government after California now?

Time to buy that compound in Montana...

While I agree that it's annoying, I don't agree that it should be a legal issue.

One thing that annoys me is people who demand regulation without having the foggiest clue of how such regulation would be implemented.

So for those who want the government to mandate that accurate nutrition information be provided by all establishments that sell food how exactly do you picture that happening? What mechanism would that regulation take and how would it be effective?

Not saying this is a good idea or not, but one way off the top of my head would be to tax restaurants that don't provide nutritional information. Then the restaurant can compare the lab fees vs potential taxes and decide which way they prefer to go.

One thing that annoys me is people who demand regulation without having the foggiest clue of how such regulation would be implemented.

So for those who want the government to mandate that accurate nutrition information be provided by all establishments that sell food how exactly do you picture that happening? What mechanism would that regulation take and how would it be effective?

Not saying this is a good idea or not, but one way off the top of my head would be to tax restaurants that don't provide nutritional information. Then the restaurant can compare the lab fees vs potential taxes and decide which way they prefer to go.

Woot, more punishments for small business! It not like it's hard to run one or anything.

Yup. Life's tough. No denying that.

What's the caloric content of this?



Because fark if I know.

If I had the menu description I could probably tell you within about 100 calories. No worse than the 'estimates' you get from the nutritional information they have available. I cooked 20 + years in restaurants and I can count on one hand the number of times I followed any recipe exactly.

In my future sci-fi world I'd have some funky implant that would count the calories exactly of everything that I eat, unfortunately we don't have those yet. All we have are estimates that the corporations are nice enough to provide to us poor unfortunate souls (sarcasm) Those estimates may or may not be accurate or even close..So even if we have the regulations, there is no way to confirm that what we are being told is even true.

Your best defense is to either cook it yourself or take an educated guess based on the ingredients you see on your dish - or better yet the menu. Most places have no problem to tell you what is in their food if you aren't sure. I have asked many times "How much ____ is on that?" or "How is that ______ cooked exactly?"

No one was responsible for my obesity, I did that ALL by myself. I took no responsibility for the ****e that I shoved in my face, the government didn't make me fat, no one forced me to eat a whole pizza or drink a 2L of soda. Any person of average intelligence should be able to figure out that eating in that way daily is NOT good for you.

As I am fond of saying these days "You aren't going to accidentally hit your goal weight" No one can MAKE you lose weight, labels aren't going to make you lose weight, laws aren't going to make you lose weight. No amount of advertising or promotions or pills or what have you are going to MAKE you lose weight. In the end we are each responsible for our OWN goals (whatever they may be) - once you begin to take responsibility for yourself (you in the general sense, not you specifically) and stop making excuses to shift the blame it becomes far easier to get to where you want to be.

I don't think making a rough estimate when dining out is too big of a deal. I agree that it would be super convenient to have nutritional information available upon request, but I don't think we need the government bungling this. And sometimes, I just don't care. I'm going to my favorite local restaurant on Saturday evening and I'm planning on having the exact dish that I love.

The only point people are making that bothers me is the whole "personal responsibility" argument, which is hilariously flawed. There are times that we need tools to take personal responsibility, and this is one of those times. Some people might not feel comfortable with estimating for whatever reason--and that is fine. I don't, however, believe that telling them not to go out to eat is a viable solution. It is completely disingenious at heart.

I do feel for those with food allergies. I have a cousin who is allergic to milk. The longest she has gone without going into anaphylactic shock is 18 months (she is in her early 40's). She has fallen victim to mislabeled food and inaccurate information from restaurant staff more than once. She still eats at restaurants. She is as careful as she can be, but she does need to rely on accurate information regarding ingredients.

I do believe that we deserve some level of transparency with our food. Barring calorie counts, it would be possible for a restaurant to at least be able to publish ingredients contained in food that are high on the allergen list (peanuts, eggs, shellfish, milk, etc). I'm not saying that they should have to give you a list of EVERY ingredient, but a list should be kept so that staff can check ingredients with some sort of accuracy for customers.

I don't think making a rough estimate when dining out is too big of a deal. I agree that it would be super convenient to have nutritional information available upon request, but I don't think we need the government bungling this. And sometimes, I just don't care. I'm going to my favorite local restaurant on Saturday evening and I'm planning on having the exact dish that I love.

The only point people are making that bothers me is the whole "personal responsibility" argument, which is hilariously flawed. There are times that we need tools to take personal responsibility, and this is one of those times. Some people might not feel comfortable with estimating for whatever reason--and that is fine. I don't, however, believe that telling them not to go out to eat is a viable solution. It is completely disingenious at heart.

I do feel for those with food allergies. I have a cousin who is allergic to milk. The longest she has gone without going into anaphylactic shock is 18 months (she is in her early 40's). She has fallen victim to mislabeled food and inaccurate information from restaurant staff more than once. She still eats at restaurants. She is as careful as she can be, but she does need to rely on accurate information regarding ingredients.

I do believe that we deserve some level of transparency with our food. Barring calorie counts, it would be possible for a restaurant to at least be able to publish ingredients contained in food that are high on the allergen list (peanuts, eggs, shellfish, milk, etc). I'm not saying that they should have to give you a list of EVERY ingredient, but a list should be kept so that staff can check ingredients with some sort of accuracy for customers.

First bolded: It's not personal responsibility if you're having someone else take the responsibility to do it for you.

Second bolded: Some level of transparency can be achieved with three little words. "What's in this?"