Restaurant patrons in Montgomery County could be forced to face their calorie intake when dining.
Council Member George Leventhal wants to require restaurants with more than 10 locations nationwide to list the calories, grams of saturated fat and sodium content of food items on their menus or menu boards.
Leventhal’s chief of staff, Patty Vitale, told The Examiner that Leventhal is seeking input on the idea and hopes to introduce a bill by the end of the summer.
“New York City did something similar to this that will take effect in July,” Vitale said.
Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said studies show 80 percent of Americans want restaurants to list nutritional information on menus.
“The problem is the restaurant industry has worked very hard in other cities to thwart similar efforts,” Wootan said.
She said large restaurant portions are contributing to the country’s “obesity epidemic.”
“Providing nutrition info on Web sites isn’t consistent with the reasons people eat out,” Wootan said. “They’re on the run and it’s a matter of convenience. McDonald’s boasts they are putting nutritional information on the packaging, but by the time the customer gets that it is too late.”
Melvin Thompson, vice president of government relations for the Restaurant Association of Maryland, said he had expressed some concerns about menu labeling to Leventhal.
“Chain restaurants go well beyond fast-food restaurants,” Thompson said. “They include Outback Steakhouse, the Cheesecake Factory and Clyde’s — places that have variations in preparation methods based on what staff is cooking each item each day. They also have daily specials and constantly changing menu items.”
Claude Andersen, corporate operations manager for Clyde’s Restaurant Group, which has two Montgomery County locations, said he thinks menu labeling is a bad idea for smaller chains like Clyde’s.
“I don’t even know how we’d be able to do that,” Andersen said. “We don’t prepackage or preportion things like larger chains, so we’d have a difficult time ensuring our analysis for any one item was accurate.
“You’d almost have to have a registered dietitian or somebody who can analyze the food on your payroll. Maybe McDonald’s has that, but we don’t.”
