They sent letters to Baskin-Robbins Inc., Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings Inc., Cold Stone Creamery, the Haagen-Dazs Shoppes Inc., TCBY and Friendly Ice Cream Corp., telling the chains to add healthier alternatives and put nutritional facts on their store menu boards or face potential litigation.
They’re going after Ben and Jerry’s!!! I don’t know about others, but I’m perfectly aware that ice cream is very fattening. And no, I don’t want any healthy alternatives. When I indulge in ice cream, I want to INDULGE.
This is the slippery slope that all that tobacco litigation is leading us down, though. People have gone from wanting to punish tobacco companies for lying about the healthiness of cigarettes to wanting the government to protect them from the consequences of their own choices.
Frankly, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to launch such a lawsuit. Sure there’s potential money in it, but it seems really unlikely that this case will go anywhere, and in the meantime you are announcing to the world that you are a dimwitted moron that doesn’t realize that ice cream is fattening.
I can’t imagine this will go anywhere. Tobacco is a special case, because for years cigarette companies lied about whether cigarettes are unhealthy or addictive, when the evidence shows they knew both were the case (way back when, they even tried to promote the idea that cigarettes were healthy). No ice-cream maker is trying to pretend that ice cream isn’t bad for you.
I sure hope you’re right. Otherwise it’s bye-bye to the fattening and ever so tasty soft-ice we know, and hello to low-fat tasteless yoghurt (But then again, yoghurt probably causes cancer or even EBOLA, so it’s unlikely that they stop there).
Ummm… isn’t TCBY the healthier alternative to ice cream already? Seems like an odd target.
And every one of those companies offers a low fat/sugar alternative to their normal fare.
This is just aonther example of the “blame someone else” mentality that is seeping into our culture. Your kid not getting good grades in school? Claim that the lesson plan is ethnically biased and sue the school. Didn’t get that new job? Claim that affirmative action caused reverse discrimination and sue the company. Your kid gunned down 6 people at school? Blame TV, music, or video games and sue till your heart’s content.
Too fat? Sue McDonalds and Ben and Jerry’s and claim that if they had nutritional information posted that you wouldn’t stuff your face there 6 days a week.
Would posting nutritional information really do any good. Do most people even know how the nutritional information relates to their food intake.
I honestly don’t have a clue how many calories I take in for a meal. And I don’t know which vitamins and minerals are in the food I eat. What I do know is that I’m healthy, normal weight, and in good shape. I don’t over eat. I don’t load up on fatty foods, and generally try to have a bit of everything. I get regular exercise. And I indulge in ice cream once in a while.
Well, some people don’t want to make responsible choices all on their own. They want the government to do it for them, so they won’t have to think so hard. They want to have their cake and eat it, too, dammit. With ice cream.
The brand name of the line of microwave meals I usually eat for lunch is Healthy Choice. Oh yeah, they are SO motherfucking sued for misleading advertising.
Not really. Processed, store-bought foods come in carefully measured serving sizes and have no variation from serving to serving. Any nutritional information that you put on food served at a restaurant is going to be, a best, a rough estimate. You might as well wonder why food distributors don’t have to put nutritional information on produce. Many restaurants also change their menu on a daily basis, and would have to have some sort of system in place to calculate the nutritional value of specials and such on the fly. It would likely be a rather onerous regulation, especially for small restaurants.
Not really. Processed, store-bought foods come in carefully measured serving sizes and have no variation from serving to serving. Any nutritional information that you put on food served at a restaurant is going to be, a best, a rough estimate. You might as well wonder why food distributors don’t have to put nutritional information on produce. Many restaurants also change their menu on a daily basis, and would have to have some sort of system in place to calculate the nutritional value of specials and such on the fly. It would likely be a rather onerous regulation, especially for small restaurants.[/quote]
Even a rough estimate would be an improvement. “This much chicken, this much sugar, you do the math.”
Bagged lettuce at the store has it on the back, so I’m not sure why some produce has it and some doesn’t.
Except that doesn’t tell the whole story nor could the average person look at a detailed breakdown of the components of any meal and actually be qualified to determine it’s nutritional impact.
Actually, the restaurant would have to do the math, and as I said, it would probably be a lot of work to remain in compliance with a constantly changing menu. The same dish may even change from person to person, since people ask for food to be prepared differently and portion sizes vary.
Bagged lettuce at the store has it on the back, so I’m not sure why some produce has it and some doesn’t.
Bagged lettuce is measured and packaged by weight; nutritional information is a constant from bag to bag.
I’m just not following how this would be an enormous burden. The kind of restaurants with a constantly changing menu tend to be the kinds that charge a ton, and could easily afford to add up the listings on the back of the ingredients.
And what difference does requesting a smaller portion size make? If you order a half, it’s pretty obvious.
You are kidding, right? I can’t think of a single sit-down restaurant that doesn’t have different stuff on the menu every day of the week. My local pub has a different dinner menu every night. The only restaurants that I know of with completely static menus are fast food chains; even most sit-down chains (Outback, TGIF, Unos, etc.) have daily specials.
And what difference does requesting a smaller portion size make? If you order a half, it’s pretty obvious.
And if that were the only sort of custom order you could make in a restaurant, then I guess it wouldn’t be a problem. If I went to my local pizza place and ordered a medium pie with half pepperoni, black olives, and garlic (the Prince of Pizzas) and half sausage and peppers, I think it would be a pretty major pain in the ass for the restaurant if they were legally obligated to weight and measure each of the ingredients they put into the pie so that they could provide me with a nutritional breakdown.
Just imagine! Nutritional information waivers that a customer would have to sign to acknowledge that they requested a custom order and have waived the requirement for nutritional information to be provided. Ordering a pizza has never been so much fun.
Dude, you’re wishing that Star Trek replicators were a reality here. This notion that there should be full disclosure about the nutritional content of everything you order at a restaurant is a pipe dream, sorry to say.
I don’t know what illusions you may harbor about restaurants, but I know this: when you order a 12-oz steak, it may not weigh precisely 12 ounces. Even four-star restaurants don’t “construct” their meals to exact specifications - they go by general guidelines. So when you order a half a portion, you may get exactly 50% of the normal amount of 12 - oops - of somewhere around 12 ounces. You may get 55%. How are you going to know the difference? Why should they go through all the extra effort to make ABSOLUTELY SURE there is no difference and that yes, you got 50.0000000000%?
Let alone places like the fast food coney/ice cream store I used to work at - measurements were handled in a vague sense to say the least. I forget what the guidelines to making a plain vanilla shake were, but that’s all they were - guidelines. Something like 3 oz of ice cream, then fill the cup to approx. 90% capacity with milk, mix… who knows exactly, but believe it or not if I weighed the ice cream amount and it came to, say, 2.8 oz, I wasn’t going to add any more! If I hit the 3.3 mark, whoops, well tough for the customer whose milkshake has just become .09% thicker, because I’m not going to measure out exactly .3 oz of ice cream and scoop that shit out of the cup before continuing to make it.
Oh, and if I did, I’m sure the customer wouldn’t be wondering why the hell it was taking so long to make the thing. We all know how perfectly rational people behave in restaurants.
And on top of all that, what if the customer requests customizations to their food? In the case of my old fast food joint, say they ask that their milkshake be made thick? Do I then make the milkshake then have it analyzed by the FDA in order to calculate the exact nutritional content of it before serving?
I’m not saying your idea is bad, it’s just incredibly impractical.
Oh, give me a fucking break; these objections are nonsensical. A law specifying that restruants make the pre-cooking nutritional content of the ingredients to a dish of regular portion size available upon request would be a non-issue.
Take the pizza thing, for example: why on earth are you assuming they’d have to manually calculate the nutritional content of your pizza toppings on the fly? A chart with “a full topping of olives is X calories and so on” would be the obvious solution.
And on top of all that, what if the customer requests customizations to their food? In the case of my old fast food joint, say they ask that their milkshake be made thick? Do I then make the milkshake then have it analyzed by the FDA in order to calculate the exact nutritional content of it before serving?
Then the customer is just going to have to use the information as a rough guildline, for chrissakes. We don’t demand canned food companies specify the contents of their product to 18 significant digits, why do you think resturants would be required to?
