City of Seattle Nutrition Posting Law Not Working and Won’t

Amidst great fanfare, the City of Seattle is now requiring chain restaurants to post nutritional information, the thinking being that information is power and now that people know that their favorite Burrito is a billion calories, they won’t order it.  And the result? According to the Seattle Times . . .

In reality, the new nutrition-labeling rule, passed amid much controversy by the King County Board of Health in 2007 and amended after much haggling thereafter, doesn’t appear to be as big of a deal as opponents feared.

In a food-focused tour of Seattle on Thursday, we saw patrons paying so little notice to the new rule that we initially wondered whether we had discovered a new sort of temporary blindness, perhaps caused by growling stomachs.

“I didn’t see the sign,” said Bruce Flemins, of Seattle, enjoying a plateful of Ivar’s fish and chips.

“Uh … I didn’t notice,” said Kevin Sakuda, of Queen Anne, after stepping up to a Baja Fresh counter in Fremont, where he ordered a burrito as he stood alongside a new 2-foot-high nutrition sign.

Other patrons noticed the calorie information, but it didn’t faze them.

“We eat what we want,” said Damon Mayfield, of Colorado Springs, Colo., as he sat with a group of friends lunching at Ivar’s. Learning that, say, an order of fish ‘n’ chips contained 606 calories had “not the slightest effect” on his choice, he said.

Jonathan Andersen, a Los Angeles resident visiting his father who lives in Puyallup, made a lunchtime trip to Ivar’s and saw that the bread bowl he craved could be problematic, caloriewise. He ordered it anyway, but he overcame his guilt by vowing not to eat every last morsel.

“It’s impossible to eat the whole thing anyway,” he later confessed.

Ivar’s posted its nutrition information about three weeks ago, crew member James Fisher said, but nothing much has changed.

“People don’t care,” he said. At worst, they get mixed up and think the calorie counts are really the prices.

Newsflash, information isn’t power.  It’s just information.

Tags: Seattle, nutrition information, information, decision making