Tag calories:

What Calories Do

Posted on by Nina Mackert

In May this year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) introduced new labels that will have to be printed on most packaged food products by July 2018. In a presentation at the White House, Michelle Obama praised the label as making “a real difference in providing families across the country the information they need to make healthy choices.” Recent posts on this blog have discussed notions of transparency and choice. Today, I want to add some remarks on the history and politics of the gauge on which a lot of today’s food talk is based: on calories. The new food label includes a line on added sugars as well as changes in serving sizes. Its most visible change, however,…

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Burek? Nein Danke

Posted on by Jernej Mlekuz

The burek – a pastry made of phyllo dough with various fillings, well-known in the Balkans, in Turkey (bürek) and also in the Near East by other names – probably arrived in Slovenia in the 1960s. Industrially, the most ambitious of the Yugoslav republics, Slovenia needed a workforce. And with that workforce – immigrants from the former Yugoslav republics – came the burek. To paraphrase Max Frisch: We called for a workforce and we got bureks! But the burek might have remained unknown to the majority of Slovenes if not, in the 1960s, “foreign” burek stands (run by Albanians from the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia) appeared in various Slovene towns with high concentrations of immigrants or soldiers. Until the…

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Clinton, Chipotle, and the Calorie Counters: How (Not) to Think About Restaurants

Posted on by Christoph Ribbat

For lunch Hillary Clinton ingested 840 calories, 1.270 milligrams of sodium and 11.5 grams of saturated fat. This was on Monday, April 13, 2015. She had takeout from a Chipotle outside of Toledo, Ohio. A surveillance camera recorded her visit. One day before, she had launched her campaign for the US Presidency. Where did we get the nutritional data? New York Times writer Kevin Quealy did the research for us. His piece claims that Clinton had the “chicken bowl, white rice, black beans, fresh garden salsa, shredded cheese, lettuce and guacamole.” Using a Chipotle calorie calculator, the journalist computed how Clinton’s order at the slightly upscale fast food restaurant compares to the national average. Apparently, Quealy states, her lunch “was…

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