Labeling pizza - our government at work

How do you provide a nutritional label for a pizza when the customer hasn't even ordered it yet? From Reason:

How a Federal Menu-Labeling Law Will Harm American Pizza
This week, as a new Congress was being sworn in, the Food and Drug Administration released two sets of controversial and long-delayed food-safety rules.

One of the 800+ that were delayed until after the election. More:

Another FDA rule that�s been long in the making is the agency�s proposed menu-labeling rule.

The purpose of that rule, first proposed in 2010 as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is to �provid[e] information to assist consumers in maintaining healthy dietary practices.�

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? You know this as Obamacare. More:

In an op-ed published last year in The Hill, the CEO of Domino�s, J. Patrick Doyle, criticized the proposed rule as �a one-size-fits-all set of rules for menu labeling that will result in wide calorie ranges for entire pizzas on menus consumers will not even see, but will cost small business owners thousands of dollars a year.�

Those costs can range upwards of $5,000 per franchise location. The cost to grocers�a cost that, as with pizza, would no doubt be passed on to consumers in the form of higher food costs�would be even greater.

Why so costly?

"With 34 million ways to make a pizza, it makes no common sense to require this industry�which already discloses calories voluntarily, for the most part�to attempt to cram this information on menu boards in small storefronts,� says Lynn Liddle, who chairs the American Pizza Community, a coalition representing much of the American pizza industry, in an email to me.

Ideology instead of simple common sense. It's not as though calorie labels do any damn good -- studies here (No), here (Nope) and here (No either).