With a gift certificate to spend and a deep reluctance to cook dinner, I bundled the family in the car for an evening at one of America's great chain restaurants. Now, as avid readers will doubtless know, I, having grown disenchanted with the prospect of entering my forties as a big fat slob, am trying to shape up a little. Okay, a lot. To that end I've been keeping scrupulous records of my intake of calories and nutrients.
Greg Critser points out, in his brilliant and damning book Fat Land, that it is difficult, even counter-intuitive, to exercise self-restraint in the face of apparently limitless abundance; our bodies are designed by evolution to function on a feast-or-famine paradigm. But the gargantuan portions are only part of the problem here. The biggest issue, when one does not prepare one's own food, is that one simply does not know what goes into it—and thence into one's body.
I wasn't overly concerned, at the time. I assumed that I'd be able to find nutritional information for the chain online—because (I assumed) chain restaurants are required, aren't they, either by law or by basic ethical standards, to make the nutritional content of their dishes available to the dining public—aren't they?
Well, guess what?
These faux-Aussie lardmongers don't play that game. The issue, it seems, is an intellectual-property concern—that is, a paranoid fear of having their recipes stolen. As if knowing the saturated-fat grams and fiber count would somehow allow me to reverse-engineer a Bloomin' Onion.
In this time of blighted plenty, with the Western world awash in cheap calories and obesity reaching epidemic proportions, a corporate policy of stonewalling concerned consumers who ask nutritional questions seems deeply irresponsible. The creepy corporatespeak only makes it worse: "Outback Steakhouse does not make nutritional claims about our menu items..." Hey, buddy, I'm not asking you if the Cheese Fries cure cancer, okay? I just wanna know how much sodium is in the dish, so I'll know how much of it I can safely eat without making my head explode. Jesus.
Best of all is the last para. Dig it: it's not a restaurant, it's a "concept." So presumably it's exempt from the ethical rules governing, y'know, actual dining establishments. Perhaps next time I go, I'll pay my tab with Monopoly money; conceptual payment for my conceptual meal.
Unfortunately, though, I don't think there's going to be a "next time." The calories and fat are quite real—and so is the corporate arrogance that suggests that we as consumers not worry our pudgy little heads about such things. Well, sorry,"mate," but that's poor citizenship in my book, and not an attitude I care to support with my dollars.
Come on, guys—what are you hiding? For Christ's sake, if McDonald's can come clean, why won't you?
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