Bloomberg Must Be a Fan of Kitchen Bitch

Restaurants take note: your report card will be plastered on the proverbial refrigerator for all to see. When I started this blog over a year ago, one of my first posts discussed LA’s restaurant grading system and how, after many hair sandwiches, I couldn’t believe NYC had nothing more than some inspection info buried deep within the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s website. No more. Hopefully the salt wizard will back this one too.

“Restaurants will be graded on food safety starting at the end of July, city officials said Tuesday. The NYC Health Department announced it has drawn up plans to begin assigning grades of A, B or C to the city’s over 24,000 restaurants.

Restaurants with 0 to 13 “violation points” will receive an A. Scores of 14 to 27 points are a B, and 28 or more results in a C.

…According to the NYC Department of Health, Los Angeles’ implementation of letter grades resulted in twice as many restaurants receiving the highest food safety standards: 40 to 80 percent.”

A pseudo-fast food, surprisingly popular Indian restaurant around the corner from my apartment, Curry in a Hurry, closed down for 1 week last month because they failed their food safety inspection. Had there been a “C” grade posted on the front door, the cheap prices would not be enough to keep grossed out customers from deciphering where violation points were accumulated (was it the curry or the hurry?)

Finally, a way for New Yorkers to gain some control over the food we eat and a lot more accountability for restaurant owners. No more blaming poor regulation for rat infestations in Taco Bell or the painfully indifferent “my workers wear hair nets” response I once received from the manager at Lyric Diner after finding and clearly displaying to him a short, curly dark hair in my chicken wrap. Sorry Mr. Rude Dude, they clearly don’t.

For those of you who will continue to frequent restaurants where the food and environment reminds you of a gym sock, enjoy the pleasure of building up immunity to various food-borne bacteria. For the rest of us, let’s embrace the power of choice.

Danger! High Cholesterol and Diabetes Ahead

Just as the “Smart Choice” label might make you more inclined to buy a product, the Korea Food and Drug and Administration is looking to label more than 70 percent of hamburgers and chocolate as unhealthy (read: danger!).

“The Korea Food and Drug Administration revealed a draft plan for its system, under which depending on the amount of unhealthy ingredients in food products, three labels — colored red, yellow or green — will be attached to the packaging of food items.

“It is the minimal standards that we ‘recommend.’ We will see whether it is an effective measure or not. We will, then, decide whether to make it mandatory or further expand it. We have tried to solicit opinions from companies,” Park [Hye-kyung, director of the nutrition policy division at the KFDA] said.

Called the “traffic light label system,” the plan focuses mainly on the amounts of fat, saturated fat, sugars and sodium contained in certain products.”

How can the health of the population not be mandatory? What’s the point of passing the legislation in the first place? Why wouldn’t you give U.S. FDA inspectors carte blanche to recall contaminated food rather than the motherly slap on the wrist. The Food Modernization Act, currently stalwart in the Senate, would give the FDA power to force a recall and avoid disasters like the recent bagged lettuce E.coli catastrophe.

Not only should the U.S. adopt a similar labeling system as the above, it should be mandatory for every food manufacturer that receives FDA approval.

The general trend is that, the lower your household income, the more likely you are to eat fast food or other processed foods because they provide a much larger calorie punch for the buck… Fair enough. But for those Americans who choose to eat unhealthily, sit on welfare and drain our tax dollars for medical expenses simply due to the fact that they are not responsible enough for themselves and their children to have healthy eating habits, perhaps an “Avoid” label would help those that need help make better diet decisions.

What’s In a Serving Size?

Whether shoveling down your favorite cartoon character-revered sugary cereal or rhythmically chomping on an entire bag of Doritos, portion controlling your nosh via the nutrition label is a tedious and sometimes daunting task which leads many consumers to just blindly take a guess. In their crusade to revamp nutritional labeling and make it more understandable, the FDA is moving key ingredients—nothing like a good pun, in this case it refers to the serving size, calories, etc.—to the front of the package:

“The goal is to give people a jolt of reality before they reach for another handful of chips. But the urgency of the message could be muted by a longstanding problem: official serving sizes for many packaged foods are just too small. And that means the calorie counts that go with them are often misleading.

So to get ready for front-of-package nutrition labeling, the F.D.A. is now looking at bringing serving sizes for foods like chips, cookies, breakfast cereals and ice cream into line with how Americans really eat. Combined with more prominent labeling, the result could be a greater sense of public caution about unhealthy foods.”

Serving sizes are smaller than you expect. For example, an ounce of potato chips is the typical serving size and comes in, on average, at about 150 calories. If you’re eating baked chips, that could mean about 14 crisps per serving whereas, if you’re shoveling down Tostitos, how many of us stop at the 6 crisps per serving? Even a 99% Fat-Free can of Progresso soup boasts only 100 calories per serving whereas the entire can will set you back about double that.

We will officially have nobody to blame but ourselves for our gluttonous tendencies and it’s for the better. Not only will we be more mindful of what we eat but this will create an opportunity for consumers to feel more in control of their choices in packaged foods.

The Real Smart Choice Label

Whether it’s to count calories or see how hyped up on sugar a food with make your kid, many of us are familiar with the “Nutrition Facts” food label. Some parts are clear to understand like calories and serving size. Other parts can seem a little more daunting like the ingredients list where scientists have a field day with terminology that scares more than it does educate (ex: ascorbic acid is actually just Vitamin C).

So it only makes sense that a makeover is in order. Don’t worry, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is on the case.

Of the changes, the most important one to note is that the CSPI hopes the FDA will enforce stricter regulations regarding claims a brand can make such as strengthening your immune system, saying a product contains whole grain but doesn’t disclose how much, and boast the lack of trans fat to cover up the copious amounts of saturated fat.

Here’s a breakdown of changes you can expect:

“1. Put calorie and serving size information in larger type at the top of the label so it’s immediately clear how much you are eating.
2. Make the ingredient list easier to read by printing it in regular type instead of all capital letters. Use bullets to separate ingredients rather than allowing them to all run together.
3. List minor ingredients and allergens separately from the main ingredient list. Highlight allergy information in red.
4. List similar ingredients together and show the percentage by weight. For instance, sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup and grape juice concentrate are all forms of sugar and should be listed in parenthesis under the catchall heading “sugars.”
5. Use red labeling and the word “high” when a product has more than 20 percent of the daily recommendation for fats, sugars, sodium or cholesterol.
6. Make it clear which sugars are added to the product versus those that occur naturally.
7. Display prominently the percentage of whole grains contained in a product.
8. List caffeine content.“