Chain restaurants and their customers will soon feel the pinch of an expensive ObamaCare requirement that has been flying under the radar until now. ObamaCare mandates that "restaurants and similar retail food establishments" print nutritional information on their menus.
The restaurant industry is extremely competitive. If consumers demand menu labeling, restaurants will meet that demand. In fact, many restaurants already do provide nutritional labeling.
But private solutions aren't enough for menu labeling proponents. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is implementing the menu labeling requirement, tries to justify its rule by claiming that the public (poor fools) are misinformed and simply don't request "sufficient" information.
In other words, since many people patronizing restaurants are not purchasing the most nutritious meals on offer (as determined by the government), this must be a market failure. One that government must fix. Hence, information mandates must be imposed and expanded until the desired actions are achieved. For the nation's nutrition czars, if information mandates don't work, then there must be bans, such as the New York City soda ban.
The entire approach rests on a faulty assumption: that customers fail to select the most nutritious meals available only because they lack information about nutritional content.
In the real world, nutritional information is the last thing most people want to think about when ordering at a restaurant. Going out for a meal is usually an escape, and often an indulgence. Few go to a fancy steakhouse and just order a side salad.
Via: American Thinker
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