Undersize me

Finish your food, said the Pope, for many go hungry. Some even starve to death.

The diet of my colleague violates this “commandment”. I call it the “half-half” diet. His approach is simple, and effective for him, too. He only eats half of everything that is served to him. So with the dinner he has with clients, food served on the plane, the set menu he orders at restaurants, and even the Chinese Lauriat, his rule never alters. He only eats half of what is served to him, except for half of his dessert (when it’s chocolate cake) that he would be happy to partake. The rest of his food simply goes to waste.

 There is no legal impediment to this diet. Stated otherwise, no law is violated if you waste what you pay for. This is a consequence of one’s property rights, which cannot be hindered unless its exercise directly hurts other people. The Supreme Court has even gone so far to say that one can do anything as he pleases with his property, because the right to enjoy includes the right to destroy. And no democracy will attempt to regulate the right of a person to waste his own purchase or property because you cannot monitor, much less control, what goes on inside people’s own homes.

What the government can do is to encourage less food wastage by passing reasonable laws. A law that requires restaurants to make available half orders of rice can be one of them. A Quezon City ordinance and a proposed law have taken this up.

Even better, however, is to lessen wastage of food by people (and for that matter, wastage of their own health) by telling them what their body needs and what they are really eating.

I am talking about the concept of requiring food service establishments in the country to put calorie counts on their menu. This, of course, is not novel as this is practiced in the US. Before it became federal law to prevent obesity, it was first done, I believe, in New York and a couple of other states. In fact, in the Philippines, some restaurants have voluntarily been doing this.

In the US, where people seem to file lawsuits as a hobby, the rule serves not only the dining customer, but also food establishments. It can always be argued that people cannot play dumb about the effects of what they are eating, and that no one forces them to eat the food they order. But this did not stop lawsuits in the US. Mostly unsuccessful, some of these lawsuits were settled out of court. Less successful are lawsuits filed by supersized teenagers who have always ordered supersized meals from fast food outlets. Or this guy who ate nothing but burger meals for a month. However, whenever a lawsuit survives, or when the person suing was able to extract money, it is because of putting forward the principle of “comparative negligence”. In plain language, we can call it shared responsibility.

A case in point is the popular US case involving a 79-year-old woman who ordered hot coffee to go from a popular food chain. While inside the car, she placed the coffee cup between her knees and attempted to put sugar and cream in it. But the cup of very hot coffee tilted and spilled entirely on her lap. Her clothing did her no favor as it absorbed the hot coffee that then gave her third-degree burns. She spent eight days in the hospital undergoing skin grafting. During the trial, it was shown that the coffee from this establishment was served at a higher temperature (some 85 degrees Celsius) hotter than other establishments (at about 60 degrees Celsius), so the spilled coffee burned the skin more efficiently. Many think that this was a frivolous lawsuit. But what we picked up is the use of “comparative negligence” to favor the patron. That is, both are negligent, but the food establishment was considered more negligent for not having warned its customers about the temperature of the coffee. (Thereafter, they warned patrons through labels that “coffee is served very hot”.)

Another popular food chain in the US was sued because it did not inform its customers that it was still using trans fat (hardened liquid oil) for cooking. And trans fats can cause heart attack or stroke. That food chain is no longer using trans fat in its kitchen after that lawsuit.

The common denominator in lawsuits that had some success and where food establishments were considered partly negligent (or compelled to share responsibility) was the lack of information or warning for its patrons.

Food manufacturers and retailers normally do not have this problem because rules globally require food items to indicate nutrition facts and values in their labels. So it can be said that requiring the same (like calorie count) from service establishments is not unreasonable. Anyway, nowadays, calorie count is available in applications accessible through mobile phones (you may learn that one siomai, for instance, has 100 calories).

A bill was already passed by a senator, not out of vested interest, requiring calorie counts to be indicated on food menus. While you may say that this bill struggles, if you consider a population who are fans of “eat-all-you-can” buffets (or for that matter, “eat-all-the-time”), it is a legitimate attempt to respect the constitutional mandate of people’s right to health.

It seems the end game should be this: if people are informed, and they ask only what they need, better health is promoted and wastage is avoided.

It is not lost on us, though, that it takes more than laws to create a culture, or rather, avoid a “culture of wastage”. While counting calories, we should be counting blessings. And live with the thought that wastage is a simple act of ingratitude. Over blessings, we have no vested rights.

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Alexander B. Cabrera is the chairman and senior partner of Isla Lipana & Co./PwC Philippines. He also chairs the tax committee of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP). Email your comments and questions to [email protected]. This content is for general information purposes only, and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.