YOUR LIFESTYLE:A FOOD fight is brewing over legislation in Washington DC that would require restaurants to post calories on menus, writes JERRY HIRSCH
Hoping to clean up a patchwork of what it says are unwieldy state and local laws, a restaurant trade group is pushing a federal bill that would require chains to disclose the calorie counts of meals on the menu.
But companies such as Domino’s, KFC and El Pollo Loco say the proposed legislation lets too many restaurants off the hook. They want to broaden the requirement to include many individual eateries and small chains.
The fight has become so intense that the warring parties have made some unusual alliances. The National Restaurant Association (NRA) has forged a pact with a public policy interest group often called the “food police” and long a foe of the industry. It sees the proposed legislation, introduced by Senator Tom Harkin, in May and, since combined with a competing bill, as the best way to expand menu labelling nationwide after years of objections by the restaurant trade.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen fast-food and pizza chains have linked with several health groups that believe the legislation should include as many establishments as possible.
As written, the bill applies only to chains with 20 or more restaurants operating under the same name. They must post calories on menus and provide more detailed written information, such as fat and sodium content, on request.
The 20-establishment threshold captures just 25 per cent of roughly one million restaurants nationally, says Jonathan Blum, a senior vice-president of Yum Brands Inc, which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC and several other chains.
“That is inadequate. America’s consumers deserve better,” Blum says. It’s also unfair to all the restaurants that will be required to list nutrition information on their menus, he adds.
Yum and the other companies say the regulations should apply to individual restaurants with $1 million or more in annual sales and chains with three or more locations.
“A pizza is a pizza no matter where it is purchased,” says Steve Carley, chief executive of El Pollo Loco, the chicken chain.
Large companies such as Patina Restaurant Group, which operates 60 restaurants including the Nick & Stef’s steakhouses in New York and Los Angeles and eateries in many performing arts centres, would be exempt from the rules even though the company has about $200 million in annual revenue.
The Los Angeles firm says it is exempt from a similarly worded California regulation that will be phased in by January 1, 2011, because its restaurants feature varying themes and menus, a spokeswoman says.
If passed, the federal legislation would pre-empt similar laws in California, New York City and other regions for chains with at least 20 units, but local governments still would be able to pass laws for single restaurants and smaller chains. Some states have more stringent disclosure requirements than what would be mandated under the federal bill.
Nick & Stef’s is the type of restaurant that could easily comply with the menu rules, according to some health advocates.
“This isn’t right,” says Barbara Moore, chief executive of Shape Up America, an obesity-fighting non-profit group. “Somehow we are missing the boat. If we used $1 million in annual sales instead of a random number of restaurants as the cutoff point, a restaurant like this would have to report.”
But exempting small businesses is reasonable, says Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which gained its “food police” nickname in the 1990s when it declared fettuccine Alfredo “a heart attack on a plate”.
“It is easier for the big chains to provide accurate information and deal with government regulation,” Wootan says.
Last month, the group helped a New Jersey man file a lawsuit against Denny’s Corporation alleging that the chain’s heavy use of salt puts “customers at greater risk of high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke”.
The lawsuit asks the court to order Denny’s to list the sodium content of its food on the menu and warn about the hazards of consuming salt in high doses.
But in this instance, the centre is siding with the NRA and supports the 20-restaurant cutoff, which the centre believes would capture about two-thirds of the nation’s eateries, far more than the estimates of opponents, Wootan says.
The legislation is a result of “negotiations” between the centre and the NRA and represents the best chance of establishing a national menu labelling plan, something the restaurant industry has fought for years, Wootan says.
The restaurant trade group’s priority is getting rid of local laws in favour of one national standard for menu labelling, which it says will make it easier for the national chains to standardise their menus and policies.
“We believe we are supporting the approach that has the most realistic chance of passage and the best success in preventing a patchwork of harmful regulation and legislation across the country,” says Beth Johnson, the group’s spokeswoman.
Harkin – whose bill was merged with a similar proposal by senators Tom Carper and Lisa Murkowski– doesn’t plan to lower the 20-eatery threshold.
“We think this is a good deal and is consistent with local policies,” says Bergen Kenny, a spokeswoman for Harkin.
The provisions are in the Affordable Health Choices Act, the giant healthcare overhaul bill that is tied up in the Senate Finance Committee. It has passed the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and a similar bill was introduced in the House this year.
Technological advances have made it inexpensive to calculate the nutritional content of food, undermining the argument that smaller restaurant companies and large standalone eateries need an exemption from the regulations, says Blum, the executive from Louisville-based Yum.
Although the fight over menu labelling has created unlikely bedfellows as well as a rare schism within the restaurant industry, El Pollo chief executive Carley says the issues are important. "If this is truly about nutrition and obesity," he says, "it is intellectually dishonest to have some restaurants disclose nutritional information and others not." – ( Los Angeles Times/Washington Post)