Enforcing menu calories will annoy everyone and achieve nothing

SIR – This plan to have calorie counts on all menus (report, September 5) is mad. If a government is actually considering such an idea, how can we begin to imagine that it is capable of getting us a good deal with Brussels?

This plan has no chance of working. It will drive the whole country insane, and the people it is meant to help will just carry on eating. You only have to look around you at airports or stations to realise that eating has become a national pastime.

Jane Reed

London SW10

SIR – I don’t work in the restaurant business – but even I can see that making calorie counts on menus a legal requirement would be damaging and unworkable for all but large chains serving standardised dishes.

Since it took me two seconds to work this out, why are politicians and civil servants wasting their time and our money investigating this daft idea?

Anthony Whitehead

Bristol

SIR – If we chose food simply based on calories, then we’d have a side dish of French fries instead of a helping of quinoa. Quinoa (222 calories) is a food that is high in protein, fibre, iron and other nutrients. French fries (182 calories) aren’t nearly as nutritious.

Hannah Eva

Hawkhurst, Kent

SIR – For small restaurants that make healthy fresh meals from locally sourced seasonal products (which may change every day in content and size) to be made to calculate calorie content would be expensive if not impossible.

Restaurants have had to face an onslaught of taxes and regulations in recent years, and it is hardly surprising so many are closing. Fewer small independent restaurants mean people will just end up eating takeaway pizzas and burgers.

Paul Fullagar

London SE1

SIR – Perhaps Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, can tell us what

proportion of the food consumed by our “obese” children is provided by the catering establishments he wishes to burden with the current proposals.

GP Brown

Norwich

SIR – As with health warnings on cigarette packets – those who should read them won’t.

Alan Oxer

Topsham, Devon

SIR – I was under the illusion that a Conservative government valued less state interference, not incessant nannying.

This half-baked plan to make all food outlets display calories on the menu is simply absurd. The whole country knows that eating too much of the wrong food is bad for one’s health.

To force small businesses, which the Government insists it represents, to comply shows how out of touch it is with real life.

Andrew Beevers

West Mersea, Essex