A New Line in the Sand

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Dec 14, 2006 4:00PM

You have to love Ed Burke. Either he truly means well, suffers from the "Second City" inferiority complex, or he reads Chicagoist and can't help himself. Regarding our post last week about Culver's decision to ban trans fats, we wrote:

"We guess that as soon as City Council hears about this, they'll get that Second City chip on their collective shoulder and pass the trans fat ban that Ed Burke's been slowly hydrogenating with the help of the restaurant lobby."

So we picked up this morning's Sun-Times during the morning dog walk and, sure enough, Burke did not disappoint. Knowing that his proposed ban on trans fats doesn't stand a snowball's chance in H-E-double-hockey-sticks of passing as long as Mayor Daley is ridiculing it, Burke unveiled a proposal yesterday requiring fast food chains with more than $10 million in revenue to list calorie counts, saturated fat levels, and sodium content on all packaging and menus. Burke said that he's not trying to shame people for eating poorly on the go, but with a proposal that requires the content of the food be "at least as large as the name of the menu item or price", he's doing it by extension. He would have been better off asking that a stick figure with a distended midsection be printed on all menus and packaging.

With the proposal comes the requisite rebuttal by the Illinois Restaurant Association and local fast food kings like Dick Portillo, who said that fast food customers already know what they're getting. And there's some truth to that (read the reader comments following the Sun-Times article online).

While we believe that Burke and City Council have more pressing issues, this isn't one of them. Fast food chains - be they McDonald's, Portillo's, or your corner hot dog stand - have an obligation to their customers to provide them with some form of nutritional content. They can get rid of trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, cook using low sodium and reduced saturated fats, and they should, with only a slight hit to their bottom line. The larger ones already have their nutritional information listed, either on site (in the form of tray liners and pamphlets) or online. Moreover, fast food patrons need to monitor themselves. They need to stop ordering the large sodas, the large fries, the three cookies with the six-inch, mayo-free veggie sub. All the warning labels in the world won't stop fast food patrons from overeating. We certainly don't see City Council getting into the business of telling people how to eat, after the largely ridiculed foie gras ban.