Food in the News

It's time to get a little newsy about food. According to a recent story by The New York Times, the Food and Drug Administration wants to encourage manufacturers to print important nutritional information, including calories counts, smack dab on the front of food packages. That means that soon, that box of cookies, sugary cereal or even veggie crisps will tell you exactly how many guilty calories you're about to consume.

Essentially, the F.D.A.'s goal is to give food shoppers a jolt of reality before reaching for less than healthy snacks and treats. The problem is, official serving sizes for many packaged foods are just to small, and this means the calorie amounts that accompany them can be misleading. To fix this situation, the F.D.A. is going to define serving sizes for certain junk foods in terms of how we really eat.

For us, this is a pretty scary thought. We'll admit, we've gone through a pint of ice cream before without looking at exactly how many servings we were taking in. And really, how many of us can always muster the will power to eat just one serving and then put down that bag of chips?

So maybe a big reality check in the cookies and candy aisle isn't such a bad idea. There's a lot of confusion between serving sizes and fat and calorie counts, so many people think they're eating one serving and getting this many calories, when they're not. In today's world, in which a cheese steak or pizza pie is just a phone call away, it's difficult to tell how much we really eat in a day, a week or even in one meal. But eating anything we want is possible, we're just going to have to eyeball those food labels carefully and see how much of those delicious cookies we can eat. But the difference between how servings are doled out in the food industry and how much people actually eat is suprising... from the Times article:

"For ice cream, the serving size is half a cup. For packaged muffins, it is often half a muffin. For cookies it is generally one ounce, equal to two Double Stuf Oreos. For most children’s breakfast cereals, a serving is three-quarters of a cup."

If the F.D.A. pushes for major snack manufacturers to really stick those calories on the front packages of chips, will people strive to eat healthier and eat the proper servings of their guilty pleasures? It has potential. And because, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 34 percent of adults are obese, it may be necessary.

Until then, we're going to enjoy our proper serving (okay, maybe a serving and a half) of potato chips and wonder what our shopping experiences will be like when the truth about food appears in aisles 1 through 9.

Keep craving!