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Restaurants Must Post Calories, Judge Affirms (bigaltherealone)
Posted: 9:38:43 am on 4/18/2008 Modified: Never
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COurtesy of The New York Times
Calorie counts must be posted alongside prices in some New York City restaurants, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday in upholding revised city regulations.
The restaurant association that lost on Wednesday said it would ask the judge to stay the ruling pending an appeal.
The decision, by Judge Richard J. Holwell of United States District Court in Manhattan, rejected First Amendment claims by the New York State Restaurant Association, which maintained that the mandatory labeling requirements were impermissible.
Under the rules, which the city’s health department revised after Judge Holwell struck down an earlier version last fall, any chain with at least 15 outlets nationwide would have to display calorie counts on menu boards, menus or food tags. The rules would apply to roughly 2,000 restaurants, or about 10 percent of the 23,000 in the city, the health department said.
In a 27-page opinion, Judge Holwell accepted one of the city’s main arguments for posting calorie counts — that doing so would help reduce obesity, which city officials say has reached epidemic levels.
“It seems reasonable to expect that some consumers will use the information” on menu boards and menus “to select lower-calorie meals,” the judge wrote. He added that “these choices will lead to a lower incidence of obesity.”
Some chain-restaurant outlets, among them Starbucks, have already posted calorie counts. The rules were scheduled go into effect on Monday. But the restaurant association said it was filing an appeal and would appear before Judge Holwell on Thursday to ask for a delay until after the appeal.
Chuck Hunt, a spokesman for the association, said it was disappointed in the ruling. He also said that it would cause “irreparable harm” to have to comply with the rules next week if they ended up being invalidated.
“We continue to say that each restaurant should make decisions about the best way to provide this nutritional information to their customers,” Mr. Hunt said. “Most of these restaurants that are being affected were already providing this information, but in a different format.”
But the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, called Judge Holwell’s decision “a victory for New Yorkers.”
“It will give people information they need, where they need it,” he said. “If you want to use it, great, and if you don’t, that’s entirely your right.”
The restaurant association maintained that the calorie rules violate the First Amendment because they force restaurants to convey a government message — “a message,” the judge noted in his decision, “with which they may disagree.”
The judge said the calorie counts required by the new rules are “reasonably related to the government’s interest in providing consumers with accurate nutritional information.” For that reason, he said, the rules do not infringe on restaurants’ First Amendment rights.
“The judge’s decision is crystal clear,” Dr. Frieden said. “They can go to court and delay us for a few more months, but if they do that, it just means McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken are desperate to keep this information out the hands of their customers.”
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