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Food For Thought
You are what you eat. And New York City has enacted legistlation to oblige everyone who sells food – down to the guy at the last hot-dog stand – to label the content of calories of what you may buy.
By taking this approach the consumer is effectively being discouraged (or told) to purchase items that are said to be ‘trouble’, health-wise.
How the under-funded health department of one of the world’s greatest havens of food-lovers calculates such a precise element of nutition is an in intrigue.
They must have a lot of calculators and inspectors at their downtown office.
To make their new system work they must travel to everywhere in Manhattan, daily, from the Carlyle hotel (35, East 76 th Street) to Katz Deli (205, East Houston Street) and to the pretzel stall at the corner of Fifth Avenue and West 42 nd Street.
The New York State Restaurant Association is so outraged by the regulation that they have initiated legal action in New York’s high court claiming ‘infringement of commercial freedom of speech under the First Amendment’.
Will this initiative stop New Yorkers munching their favourite sugar donuts or pastrami-on-rye ?
It is too early to tell; but old habits die hard.
So far the inspectors have not turned their attention to the amount of calories in a glass of Murphy’s stout at O’Reilly’s Pub ( 56, West 31st Street).
That is the only silver lining in a dark cloud.
