Metadish, Fresh from NYC

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Therefore, I appreciate Councilman Joel Rivera’s attempts to alter a measure, which was passed in December, that requires fast-food restaurants to prominently display the caloric count next to every item on its menu.

He isn’t proposing to make the nutritional information a secret. That would be ridiculous. He just wants the industry to hide that info a little bit. Like, maybe it should only be listed in a brochure, which is nowhere near our line of vision. We are then free to ponder the countless, delicious options provided us at Taco Bell, McDonald’s and White Castle. We are all about any measure that allows us to order Big Macs without thinking about its 700 calories.

It may seem like it, but Rivera isn’t pandering to the fast-food industry; it just happens that he is doing exactly what they want him to do.

“It’s a compromise,” Mr. Rivera said. “It brings to the table the No. 1 goal of informing the consumer, while not making it too expensive for the industry.”

Rivera’s bill, apparently, totally misses the point. The measure passed in December is totally supposed to make us feel like crap about what we are eating.

“If you’re going to post nutritional information, you need to put it where it would make a difference and where customers are going to recognize it,” Dr. Frieden said.

Rivera wants to allow us to be as willfully ignorant as we want as we slowly kill ourselves and make ourselves too obese to give a crap. He really is fighting the good fight.

City Council May Change Menu Rule on Calories [New York Times]

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