The Tennessee House of Representatives and Senate joined forces to override the veto of Governor Phil Bredesen of a bill from last year prohibiting unelected bodies (essentially those from the State bureaucracy) from forcing the State's restaurateurs to label their menus with nutritional content. The new law leaves the matter up to local authorities-usually county legislative bodies-to decide for themselves whether to require eating establishments to label their menus with nutritional content:
Rep. Susan Lynn, R-Mount Juliet, said a city council or county commission, as elected bodies, would still have the right to require posting of calorie counts. With unelected boards, she said, "voters have no recourse."
She also said that requiring calorie counts on menus can be expensive for restaurant and if different areas have different rules, the matter would become further complicated. Further, she contended menu labeling does little, if anything, to curb overeating.
In his veto message, Bredesen said Tennessee has one of the nation's highest rates of obesity and the legislation "would irresponsibly limit our state's ability to fight this epidemic."
This legislation was proposed to counter an attempt by the executive branch to impose nutritional menu-labelling on restaurants in Tennessee. It is utterly laughable that the Governor has stated that menu-labeling "fights obesity" when it does no such thing. Unless the Governor was going to propose a corresponding regulatory measure requiring restaurant patrons to order the chopped salad instead of the bloomin' onion at Outback Steakhouse and steamed vegetables instead of a loaded baked potato or Aussie cheese fries, labeling the menu only tells customers what nearly all of them know in 2010-your favorite dining items will likely add to your waistline. Folks are going to order what they want to eat (I don't about the rest of you, but I can and do fix salads at the house-if I'm going out with my family, I don't need the government to tell me the salad would be healthier than what I would really like to have).
If the Governor's motive might have been to help Tennesseans who have decided to go on a diet, those folks probably know what they shouldn't order, or perhaps that they shouldn't eat at certain places at all. Apparently the Governor felt he needed to tell us what to eat for dinner, and the General Assembly wisely said that this wasn't a very good idea.
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