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Bret Thorn
If you’re a regular reader of Nation’s Restaurant News, you probably know that moves are afoot in parts of the United States to require the posting of calorie counts on menus and menu boards in chain restaurants. This magazine has covered it a lot, discussing the logistical difficulties of implementing such rules and detailing the strategies of different restaurant associations in combating the measures.
I’d like to talk about what it means for food.
This is an exciting time for food in the United States. Consumers have become more interested in where their ingredients come from and are becoming bigger sticklers for quality, and chefs and restaurateurs are responding by giving them better things to eat.
They are doing this by changing menus more often, by being more flexible in their sourcing, by regionalizing their offerings.
Contrary to the apparent beliefs of those who would require calorie counts, this isn’t just going on at independent restaurants. A growing number of chains are actually mandating regionalization in their operations.
That’s certainly the case of Portland, Ore.-based McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurants, whose director of culinary development and training, Bill King, was just on a trip to New Zealand with me, looking at the seafood, lamb, beef, venison and other goods that country is producing.
King is committed to using local products, so getting him to use much from New Zealand, no matter how sustainable their production methods and how good their products are, will be a hard sell.
He says although about three quarters of the chain’s menu remains the same at all of its 80-plus restaurants, the chefs at each unit also are required to source local products and respond to the tastes of their markets with the other quarter of the menu.
The notion of using local food is so widespread, even at chains, that it’s the theme of this year’s annual meeting of the International Corporate Chefs Association, according to King, who is the organization’s vice president.
The ICCA membership is comprised only of chefs from chains.
Ingredients intended for local markets tend to be less consistent than the stuff intended for mass distribution, so using them requires flexibility and skill. It means chefs need to taste a carrot, for example, and adjust the other ingredients in their dish based on whether it’s a particularly sweet carrot or an earthy one, or a bland one that tastes like balsa wood.
Some flexibility is written into the proposed labeling requirements. Even labels on packaged goods are legally allowed a variance of 20 percent from what’s actually in those packages. The menu labeling rules are similar and also take into account limited-time specials, which are exempt from labeling–at least at the moment.
But the rules still miss the point. All food is special, not just that which is offered for a limited time, and many chain restaurants know that, just like many independent ones do. The burgers-fries-and-shakes mentality that these proposed rules assume is what chains are all about simply isn’t the case, and is becoming less so every day.
I’ve been on and off of diets since my rail-thin pediatrician put me on a 1,300-calorie-a-day one when I was no more than 10 years old. I understand the effects on our health of carrying excess weight and I’ve certainly found that counting calories is the best way to lose weight. I learned to count calories by reading the tables with that information in the back of my mother’s “The Joy of Cooking.” I do my best to guess at the calorie content of what I eat in restaurants and wouldn’t mind knowing if I’m close. But I wouldn’t want to know that at the expense of experiencing the joy that comes from eating food made by chefs who use their skills to make the food taste great.
By forcing chains to stick to rigid formulas just as many of them are breaking lose from them, we run the risk of stifling the creativity that over the past several decades has transformed the United States from a culinary backwater to one of the world’s greatest food nations.
