Calorie Counts! Nutrition Education? duh. . .
The nation seems to be in an uproar over mandatory calorie counts in a few restaurants in New York City. What makes that different?
People have been counting the calories in the meals they’ve been eating since Wilbur Olin Atwater first began using the word, calorie, to represent a unit of energy supplied from the diet, way back in 1895. Atwater, a professor of agricultural chemistry at Weslayan University, was instrumental in getting the US Department of Agriculture’s Office of Experiment Stations division up and running. Here’s how Professor Atwater described a calorie:
“. . . a measure of the energy contained in foods for a guide to economical food buying based solely on calories per dollar,”
as quoted in “The People’s Chronology: A Year-by-Year Record of Human Events from Prehistory to the Present” by James Trager, published in 1992.
Did you get that?
A calorie helps us make better food choices so that we can get the best food values while paying the least amount of money for the highest quality nutrition. “Based solely on calories per dollar.”
How is that a bad thing?
I’ve followed the story of calorie counts in NYC fast-food chains. I just don’t understand the uproar. But I’m a little concerned about the repeated calls for nutrition education classes that I’ve seen reported on internet news services as well as on TV and in print. Education?
I can’t think of anybody over the age of 5 who hasn’t talked about about counting calories. Everybody talks about it and most of us have done it. Calories and their calculations are just not a new thing. And those crucial calculations aren’t always easy to do when you have to tote around reference books, charts, and lists everywhere you go. Having the caloric education posted right there on the menu, right next to the prices, is about the easiest way to learn something new about nutrition that I can imagine. Calorie counts for the lazy diner. That’s me!
The American environment comes packed with an almost overwhelming abundance of educational opportunities focused entirely on nutrition. The airwaves scream with nutrition education. The internet seems to be fueled by it. Pick up a book, magazine, newspaper, food container, and so much other printed media and you’d have to be reading with your eyes closed to miss the multitude of messages about nutrition. It’s just impossible to miss it. It’s everywhere! The only honest way to miss the nutrition education in America today is to, quite simply, avoid paying attention. Is that what America’s doing? And then complaining about it??
And I wonder this, too. Why is it such a stretch of tolerance levels to find educational nutrition information also supplied on restaurant menus? What harm does that do? Or is it too relevant for comfort?
So. We have about 10% of all restaurants in the Big Apple posting essential, educational nutrition information, right in your face. Whether they want to or not. And they’re posting it right beside the prices, too, making it a real no-brainer to miss the education in both economics and nutrition that that handy situation serves up.
The lesson is there. If you miss it it’s nobody’s fault but your own. Choose to gain knowledge from the education or not. Be grateful that it’s all right there, with the appetite-numbing calculations already done for you, if you’re the kind of diner who chooses to count calories, whether they’re posted or not.
It’s your life, your lunch money. There’s room in most any restaurant for those of us who do count calories and for those of us who choose not to.
Why can’t we stop the squabbling and just enjoy lunch?