There was a time when counting my calorie intake was as easy as breathing. Though practically innumerate in maths classes, I could quickly tot up the calories I’d resisted, succumbed to and burned in a day. If restaurants and cafes had revealed the calories in their dishes, it would have played straight into my 16-year-old determination to whittle away my already whippet-like body. For the 1.25 million men and women with eating disorders in the UK, eating out is about to become even more stressful than it already is. From today, cafes, restaurants and takeaways in England with more than 250 employees will have to display the calorie information of all food and drink they prepare for customers.
This is part of the government’s wider strategy to help people who are overweight or obese, a category that includes almost two-thirds of adults in England and one in three children leaving primary school. In theory, this sounds like a simple solution: if customers who are watching their weight know a chicken katsu curry and a side of fried gyoza at Wagamama’s adds up to 1,224 calories, they might order differently. In practice, like most simple solutions, calorie labelling doesn’t really work.
