The New York Times posted this article today detailing a study of the effectiveness of posting calories in New York fast food restaurants. According to the NYTimes:
About 28 percent of those who noticed [the calories posted] said the information had influenced their ordering, and 9 out of 10 of those said they had made healthier choices as a result.
But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.
The full study is available for free here.
These findings are interesting to me because I’ve been reading Jessica Mudry’s rhetorical study of the USDA’s nutrition advice, Measured Meals. Mudry argues that the USDA has used a “language of quantification” to describe food (2)—they communicate ideas through statistics and quantities (calories, serving sizes, etc). This approach started in 1917 with the first USDA food guide and continues today. Mudry argues that this quantitative approach to a healthy national diet has been a failure (3), since it undermines the subjective, cultural, emotional, and qualitative factors that shape what we eat.
Mudry suggests a few alternatives to the discourse of quantification: discourses of taste. These approaches would be primarily qualitative, drawing on subjective experience, cultural traditions, or regional preferences. These approaches would “supplement and complement a discourse of quantification” (138).
To go back to the New York study, we could consider how geography shapes food preferences. The study in question was carried out in poor black and Hispanic fast-food customers in the South Bronx, central Brooklyn, Harlem, Washington Heights and the Rockaways in Queens.” Poor, urban regions are sometimes known as “food deserts” given the lack of options besides fast food restaurants and convenience shops. What (affordable) alternatives did the study participants have to fast food? This is not addressed in the article. Nor was the fact that people who are concerned about money (as were some of the participants quoted in the NYT article) often seek out those menu items with the highest calorie density for the lowest price. While the article does mention “additional [behavioral] policy changes,” it does not describe those alternatives in detail. It seems like Mudry’s approach might be useful to help move nutrition policymakers beyond the rationalistic, quantitative approach—an approach that doesn’t seem to work.
A side note: see this article for an alternative approach that has been implemented in Detroit: community gardens.
I *just* read that article before I opened the link to this blog and was thinking that someone (i.e., some rhetorician) should write about it. :)
ReplyDeleteAnd speaking of the quantitative approach, did you see that the NY subway system now has public advocacy advertisements telling people that they should be eating 2000 calories/day? I hadn't really thought about it before, but it is a very rationalist approach to a function (eating) that is probably the least governed by reason. Intriguing.
ReplyDeleteI think they mention that in the study--it is related to a NYC mandate that restaurants must post calories. Apparently no one cares much about calories. At least not the people who are eating the Double Whopper at Burger King.(Is there a double whopper?)
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you have read Deborah Stone's book _Policy Paradox_ but she has an extensive treatment about the limitations of rational/economic based approaches to public policy. Carolyn Miller also has a piece about nuclear power "The Presumption of Expertise" where she argues that quantitative approaches are effective ways to masque qualitative arguments. My work focuses on mathematical argument in science and I am surprised by the amount of social/cultural argument that was necessary in the nineteenth century to get biologist to adopt probabilistic models of heredity and variations in populations. If it takes a great deal for scientists to accept it, it's no surprise that lay-persons are resistant to it as well. I wonder if anyone could think of a counter instance where the numbers made folks overreact irrationally and whether that might also have been tied to a social/cultural bias.
ReplyDeleteHere's an article by Michael Pollan from today's NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11food-rules-t.html?_r=1&th&emc=th. He's apparently publishing a new book that talks about the value of cultural (lore) vs. "official" wisdom re: food and eating.
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