Comment: Just another taste of the nanny state

Published on Monday 6 April 2009 21:42

FOR many in the catering industry, this is a step too far. When people eat out for leisure and pleasure, do they want to be bombarded with nutritional information? Most people know what foods they should go easy on, writes Bob Cotton.

Eating out in a restaurant means letting go. Calorie-counting menu items is redolent of the nanny-state – one more eye over the diner's shoulder, watching and checking what he's eating.

But there are also technical difficulties, which pose even more serious obstacles. Popular branded restaurants which offer standardised menus can be reasonably certain that the pizza they sell in Edinburgh has the same calories as the pizza they sell in Glasgow or Wick.

But it's far more difficult for an independent restaurateur, who makes up different dishes every day from what's available in the market. Under time and cost pressures, he's not going to have the expertise (which would add cost, because he would have to buy it in), nor the time (which he can't spare) to work out accurately what the calorie count of each individual dish is. And if it's not accurate, how misleading might that be?

At present, it's on a voluntary basis – but voluntary schemes have a habit of becoming compulsory. It's not difficult to see a time when our regulators will want the kind of information that appears on supermarket packages to be on every restaurateur's menu.

That would probably close half the independent restaurants in the country.

&#149 Bob Cotton is chief executive of the British Hospitality Association.