By Pawan Deol
Fast food joints like Subway and Wendy’s now provide nutritional information about the food they serve. While there has been discussion about requiring other restaurants to make this information available, to date, they aren’t required to do so.
At least one local dietician says consumers do have a right to know what they are eating.
“I am for restaurants having more nutritional information on their menus, I am very for it. But, I’m not surprised to see that restaurants are not doing it,” says Nicole Blauer, a registered dietician with the Centretown Community Health Centre.
Of 13 sit-down restaurants visited at random on Elgin Street, none provided nutritional information.
Danniel Oickle, the floor manager at Dunn’s Famous Deli, says restaurants would only be able to provide an estimate.
“It would be impossible to include that information because the calorie counts would not always be the same. It would vary from chef to chef, from grill to grill,” says Oickle.
Anthony Spagnolo, the manager of Johnny Farina Restaurant, wonders if nutritional information would even be accurate.
“I think it would be impossible to break it down to a tee, especially with all the changes that go on in a restaurant,” he said. “In a perfect world, we’d love to tell you the exact nutritional content. But we wouldn’t be able to do it with 100 per cent accuracy.”