If governments intend to introduce sweeping interventions into our private lives, those interventions ought to be worthwhile. Recent legislation in the United Kingdom now mandates certain restaurants - chains that employ more than 250 people - to display calorie counts on their menus. And this was how I learned, against my best wishes, that the burger in a nearby restaurant contains well over half the recommended daily intake for a woman of my age.
Britain may be a step ahead. But adding calorie counts to menus was mooted by Irish politicians in 2015, and several times over the ensuing years such legislation has loomed on the horizon. Polling conducted in conjunction with the Journal found nearly two-thirds of respondents endorsed the idea. But since the advent of the new rules in the UK, it has formed the basis of endless hand-wringing.
It is a disheartening way to think about restaurants, places that are reserved for conviviality and indulgence. And making a bogeyman out of calories is an extreme measure, like taking a sledgehammer to a piñata. It forces us to revisit questions thrust upon us in the pandemic about the role of the state in our lives, too. To what extent are we happy to accept top-down interference on something as personal as what we choose to eat?
Of course, the intentions might well be pure. In 2021 the European Commission noted that Ireland was the second-most-obese nation in the bloc. In the UK obesity costs the state £6.1 billion a year, a figure that is predicted to increase. We know that overweight adults face a much higher risk of becoming gravely ill with Covid-19. It is reasonable to suggest, especially on the latter concern, that something could be done to ameliorate this.
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And perhaps the food we decide to eat is perfectly within the remit of government intervention. It is a private choice. But we have accepted serious reforms when it comes to smoking, for example. And so it is easy to see how such a policy came about and why so many endorse it. The steps at least appear logical: obesity is a problem and we can take steps to reduce it, therefore displaying calories on menus must be a good idea.
Unfortunately, this thinking is not just flawed but devoid of empathy, and in extreme cases potentially harmful. And as with most alluringly straightforward fixes, the evidence to support its efficacy is pretty paltry.
One study in 2019 by the Economic and Social Research Institute found people were likely to consume fewer calories when the information was included on menus. But New York adopted the policy in 2008, and a study by New York University found it to have no impact. In 2018 another study - commissioned by the US Department of Health and Human Services - found it led to people consuming on average 38 fewer calories. That is about the same as a small cup of plain asparagus. And since calorie labels have been required on menus across the US, its population has not become any slimmer.
The move is myopic, too. James Hamblin, a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, wrote in the Atlantic that we should not reduce obesity to a simple fact of personal decisions: “It’s at many levels misleading and has proven time and again to be ineffective if not counterproductive.” Instead we should understand obesity as a complicated phenomenon closely tied up with class and education. Calorie counts on menus relieve governments of their responsibility to address root causes, and instead allows them to place a moral burden on the individual.
So it seems the best-case scenario is that the efficacy of such a policy is unclear. The more likely scenario is that its effects are negligible. And all of this is before we have considered the harm it might cause those with eating disorders - pervasive and deadly diseases that increased in prevalence across Ireland over the pandemic. BEAT, a UK charity focusing on eating disorders, has a special advice page dedicated to coping with calorie counts on menus. Anecdotally, my female friends who have struggled with eating disorders in the past are nervous to eat out.
And we can be certain of one thing: parading calories in the faces of diners does nothing but remove the joy of eating. It patronises the customer (of course the burger was never going to be the healthy choice). And for women who are made to worry about their weight in all corners of their lives, it is unduly cruel to add another string to that bow. All in the name of what? An ineffectual policy?
Ultimately the question is a political one. How far are we willing to accept the state’s presence in the minutiae of our lives? And are we comfortable with governments making restaurants absorb the cost of doomed policy endeavours?
It is the job of the government to balance harms and analyse trade-offs. But it seems the advantage of calorie count policies is that they offer the appearance of proactivity. And the disadvantage? They aren’t really proactive at all.