Long post. Don't like long posts? Move along or get over it.
My gut says leave people to their choices. But gut feelings always need to be checked, and after checking mine, I'm not going to oppose legislated portion controls in one form or another. Here's why. And at the end, a modest proposal.
While some of the regulations and proposed regulation are difficult to swallow (but they're also sugar-free and low-fat), the "choice" argument doesn't really work. Customers
could have ordered and eaten two cheeseburgers in 1992. But they didn't, because the seller presented one as the serving size. Today, the same seller represents that a single cheeseburger with twice the calories is the standard serving size. The customer is choosing ONE serving of the same meal in both cases. It is silly to expect customers to toss out half their serving, even if they are old enough to remember the old serving.
In 1992, the customer
could have purchased and consumed two to four 8-ounce Cokes. But they didn't, because eight ounces was the seller's serving size. Today, Coke represents that twenty ounces is the standard serving size. (Labels pretending that an individual size unit has multiple "servings" is fraudulent. What's in the bottle is the real serving size, unless you're going be passing that bottle around the group.)
Wendy's original medium drink was 22 ounces. Their Biggie was 32 ounces. If you were thinking moderation was good, here was their representation of "medium," greatly more than anyone needs and hardly "medium" in the bottled soft drink world. In 2006, they made the former Biggie become the medium at 32 ounces and the large 42 ounces. Your already excessive, but "moderate," medium increased by 50%. Just so you don't feel bad, they dropped the Biggie from their fries and began calling it "medium" without changing the amount.
We're not going back very far for those numbers. If we go on back to the beginning, the 1955 original McDonald's hamburger weighed 3.7 ounces, of which the patty was 1.6 ounces. We could go on with examples, but maybe you can see them everywhere.
MAYBE. Because if you're not very old, you think muffins have always been that size, four times the volume they used to be. And you might think a 10-inch pizza, or even a 12-inch pizza, is a "small." And if someone put a 9-inch plate in front of you, you might think they had mistakenly given you the salad plate. And today you would be right. You wouldn't know any different.
The point is that the consumer doesn't determine what a normal portion is. The seller makes that determination. And the sellers cannot be trusted to make those decisions. They can't do it. As soon as one of them ups the size, the others are bound to follow, or they soon look like cheap pikers for offering less than a normal portion. (And, of course, they make less money when they sell less food. Not that they'd let financial gain guide them to choices that harm their customers.)
There was a time when the meal you were served was about the appropriate size, both to feel full and to nourish you through that part of the day. It's true that you could be a pig, but you would then be knowingly and perhaps publicly gobbling more than a recognized standard normal portion. Your piggish decision would be to eat MORE than normal. The normal portions, as guided by restaurants, were apparently about right.
A small demonstration for those so young they've never known anything different.
Look at any collection of photos from the 1950's, 1960's, and into the 1970's. How many people do you see who today would be thought "fat." Not many. But if you're young enough that you don't see any in those old photos, go find some photos of the "fat man" from an old carnival.
And the fat lady.
Were they fat? Sure. Would they be fat today? Sure. But remember that, back then, they were so amazingly "fat" that people would pay to look at them.
Aren't we lucky. We get to see for free.
Teachers. A rather sedentary bunch...
1950 teachers
1950 teacher candidates
2011 teachers
The 2011 student teacher candidates
The point is that people are not deliberately choosing to eat two and three times more than they should. The choice of portions is being made for them. The standard is being set, just as it was before, by the sellers of prepared meals. Those seller once set their portion size according to what portions were served at home. But business decisions drove them to increase portions sizes as a way of increasing profits. (There is no other way to effectively increase profits but by selling more food.)
Now, the meal sellers were setting the portion size. And restaurants needed bigger plates to serve more food. And so home dinner plates followed suit. Today's plates won't even fit in shelves of kitchens unmodified since the 1040's or 1950's.
There are other thins going on. The fast food meal sellers made extremely high sugar drinks the standard meal beverage. They were attractively sweet, and they were very cheap and easily stored as syrup and prepared on site. Perhaps not so terrible if this was still the standard portion:
We are not on entirely new ground here. There are limits to how potentially harmful can be stock market based products, because misuse can create great national harm to all. There are things where you can't just say "people have a choice" and leave it at that. Nor can you imagine that people will just learn to avoid such behavior. There have been investment bubble after investment bubbles for hundreds of years, each doing great general harm. But they still happen with some regularity.
I don't know if portion size can be controlled by legislation. I'm not even sure what form that legislation would take to be effective, whether it would dictate the sizes offered or whether it would mandate a prominent warning and advisory. I do know that doing nothing is a poor option. And I do know that the history of meal seller actions in response to pressure on this issue shows they will merely craft a strategy to keep their super sizes. There is a legitimate and pressing government interest in some real action. The direct load on tax money is very real. The effect on children of the supersize environment is vicious.
So, knowing there is a pressing need, perhaps a national emergency, I'm not going to say some effort is wrong or futile, because it might work or might motivate some correction, and I frankly don't have a better idea that's sure to work. I'm as shy of government regulation as most in a state with a tradition of light regulation, but the sellers of meals in this country have become, in a way that's not so outrageous to imagine, enemies of the national health and economy, and they've done it for their own financial gain and have targeted children to perpetuate their profits. This cannot be allowed, and they aren't going to effectively stop themselves.
And like most in my state, I do not intend that it be left entirely to government to fix. I start with me. Smaller plates at home. Smaller portions. And demanding restaurants serve two of us a single meal with an extra plate, paying a small fee for the extra plate and not even that in the case of fast food where the trusty pocket knife is handy. See how they like only making half from their supersize servings.
Not that's legislation I could get behind, requiring meal sellers to split single meals for a very nominal fee, but prohibited for charging more for the meal or the extra drink.