Should Restaurants Cut Back Portion Sizes?
Monday June 5, 2006
A recent report urges restaurants to serve healthier foods in smaller portion sizes. The Keystone Center released it's final report on Away-From-Home Foods: Opportunities for Preventing Weight Gain and Obesity recently. The United States Food and Drug Administration asked the Keystone Center to hold a forum to seek out ideas to fight obesity when eating outside of the home. The Keystone's suggestions include:
- Increase marketing of low calorie and smaller portioned foods.
- Update standards for marketing away-from-home foods for children.
- Create and strengthen educational programs promoting lower calorie foods.
- Lifestyle educational programs to teach people how to eat healthy meals outside of the home.
- Urge restaurants to serve lower calorie foods prepared with lower-calorie cooking techniques.
- More low and non-calorie beverages should be made available to consumers.
- Easy to understand nutritional information should be made available to consumers of away-from-home foods.
Poll: Should restaurants serve smaller portion sizes?
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Comments
I think that the supersizing of meals in the fast food industry, and the all you can eat restaurants/buffets are one of the problems with Americans being so overweight. Where I do enjoy a Chinese buffet, simply because I can have a little bit of all my favorites, I still only get one plate. Watching some people at a buffet bogles my mind and makes my stomach hurt! I prefer a nice sit-down restaurant, where the portions may be too big, but I don’t have to eat it all. At some restaurants you can also ask to substitute the fries for veggies, etc. There are many ways to eat out and eat healthy!
People who go out to eat, want their monies worth. Unless you lower the prices, if you lower the protion size. People are not going to want to eat that these places.
You can do all the changing you want, but not everyone cares about how fat they are.
The one solution that I see, is lower the prices, if your going to lower the protion size. That way if people want more they can order more.
The real issue here is self-control. Make these suggestions mandatory? That puts the resposiblity of obesity on the restaurants. Who buys the food? If the consumer (look closely at that word) wants to lose weight he/she can choose not to eat at a particular restaurant, and if enough people care that much the market will eventually catch on and change accordingly. Isn’t that how our econmy is supposed to work?
I would like to see smaller portions offered at a smaller price. Many restaurants will offer a half portion but it will only cost $1.00 less. That is not an incentive to get the smaller portion. I usually split the meal at the restaurant or take half of it home. If you get half the entree you should only pay half of what the full size is charged. I would frequent restaurants that did this.
I manage a fast food place and have seen it grow for 20 years. Literally. The only reason portions got bigger is because that is what the people wanted and are still willing to pay for it. Changing peoples minds is not going to be easy.
Joyce Goldberg did a survey of restaurant surveys a while back. If you ask people what they want, they will always reply, “smaller portions.” She also found that any restaurant actually following their customer’s advice weren’t destined to be around much longer.
Abundance on the plate is what people really want. Smaller portions is what they have been told to want.
I always figure that eating out should be a special experience. I don’t go to a top rated restaurant to have a diet experience. I can boil beets at home.
james
I agree with James. People want value when they dine out. It doesn’t matter if it’s McDonalds or the French Laundry. Smaller portion sizes would be agreeable if the pricetag follows, but this isn’t going to happen.
Food in America is relatively cheap (especially true of the ingredients used by fast food joints). The majority of the menu price covers non-food expenses like salary, rent, utilities, insurance, etc. Making the portion size smaller will only affect food costs and, therefore, will have a minimal affect on what the establishment needs to charge to stay in business.
Dear Shereen
I recently visited in Japan. The portions in restaurants are really tiny there, which is certainly one of the reasons why almost everyone is slim. At first I would think that I will have to order additional servings, but by the time I ate that small portion with chopsticks,I found that I was satisfied!
Regards, Dolores
Personally, I would prefer if the restaurants offered healthier options instead of just smaller portions. Sometimes I am forced to eat out if I’m away from home for some reason or another, yet I still want to try to eat healthy. It’s amazing how much fat can be in even half an entree. The problem with healthier entrees is that it would be more expensive for less food, even if the quality is better.
Adults should be free to make their own choices regarding meals and the size of the meals. Parents have to educate their children on proper nutrition and the excesses of advertising. The market place, and people voting with their dollars, is the best way to effect change.