Monday, January 24, 2011

Knowledge is power

I love California's nutrition information law.

I don't, as a rule, count calories, and I didn't go into Baja Fresh expecting to, but it was really good to have that information. It was perfect for my purposes: getting just enough food to tide me over for dinner, and not so much that I wouldn't need to eat until the middle of the night. Without that information, I wouldn't have been able to tell a 300-calorie grilled mahi taco from an 800-calorie bean burrito, in terms of what I needed. Also, what I do count these days is sodium, because so many macrobiotic staples are quite high in it (miso, ume vinegar/ume plums, sea vegetables, etc.). So it was great to know how much sodium I was (and was not) ordering.

So good for California (or is it just the Bay Area) for requiring the information and for Baja Fresh for having a healthy taco option.

1 comment:

Ernessa T. Carter said...

No, it's all of California. And frankly as someone who was determined to lose 40 pounds last year, I found it hardest when I traveled, b/c the only other place that seems to do it on the East Coast was au bon pain. Though, I do wish they'd make everyone do it. Only chain restaurants have to adhere to these rules, so when I'm running low on calories for the day, I find myself campaigning to go to places like Applebee's b/c they have 500 calorie menu options, and if I go to a "nice" restaurant, I don't have access to the nutrition info. Apparently this was a concession for small business, b/c getting nutrition info for your food is very expensive. So I guess what I really wish is that there was a cheaper way for one-off restaurants to get nutrition info for their menu items so that they, too, could be made to provide this information.