Questions of the week: Is the idea of calorie counts on menus workable?

The howl of rage from the Irish restaurant trade over this week’s news of Cabinet approval for calorie counts on menus contrasts with how the move is going down in

American restaurants.

Calories are being sold as another service the American restaurant can offer its customer. The National Restaurant Association's chief executive Dawn Sweeney said in November the rules would empower customers to make the best dietary choices.

There's a strong public health argument that information is power. One study found that Starbucks customers ordered items with 6 per cent fewer calories when the coffee chain put calories on its menu.

But when you look closely at the new American menu rules, they are a very different kettle of fish (609 calories) to what Irish restaurants may be facing.

Menu labelling in the US will only apply to restaurants with 20 or more outlets, to vending machines, amusement parks and prepared foods in supermarkets. Seasonal foods like Thanksgiving dinners and daily specials will be exempt. Alcohol calories will also be listed. It sounds like a workable system targeting the kinds of food and drink that are making Americans – who consume 30 per cent of their calories outside the home – fat.

Restaurants with 20 or more outlets typically provide food prepared to laminated sets of instructions in central warehouses with ingredients measured to the gram by cost accountants. With food like this, uninspiring calorie counting is simple.

But let’s take a small restaurant where a chef is working their socks off with a daily menu. A calorie count is another task, another reason to give up all that daily menu nonsense and print up a laminated, unchanging, freezer-dependent list where inspiration is confined to the choice of font. It’s a deterrent to good cooking.

The workability of precise calorie counts on restaurant meals is fuzzy to say the least.

An extra dollop of olive oil? That’s 120 calories. Do we see calorie police parcelling up portions and taking them to a lab to be incinerated in a calorimeter to determine how much energy is in them?

Calories are a sledgehammer to crack the nut (14 calories) of obesity. Not all calories are equal. Making all restaurants list them is workable, only by reducing the world to a cooking- by-numbers assembly line.