Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. DeSAULNIER. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.
Mr. Chairman, I rise to express my strong opposition to H.R. 2017. I do this in the context of my background and my professional life, 40 years in the restaurant business.
I started as a busboy and a dishwasher. I have worked in chain restaurants and fast-food restaurants and owned multiple fine-dining restaurants in the Bay Area and have done consulting to restaurants throughout California.
I was an author along with a colleague in the State legislature. At that time, the first statewide menu labeling legislation in the country was in California. My colleague had been on the L.A. City Council, I had been in local government in the bay area, and we had started in local government doing this.
We took 2 years, from 2006 to 2008, to work with a Republican administration and a Democratic leadership of both Houses in California. I worked with the California Restaurant Association, which I was a longtime member of.
At the end of the day, we accommodated all people's interests, including the stakeholders in the pizza industry. What we had was a remarkable piece of legislation that is helping to address what the Center for Disease Control called over 10 years ago a national epidemic in this country, a national epidemic of obesity, particularly for young people, for young Americans, of which as many as two-thirds of them deal with obesity every day, or overweight, and obesity-related diseases, like diabetes type 2, has expanded over 300 percent since 1971, when many of us were younger. This is a national epidemic.
When we were doing the legislation in California, we considered cost benefits. We worked, as I said before, with the Restaurant Association. As somebody who spent 4 years in the Restaurant Association--and they were independent restaurants so I understand that this would not apply directly--but many of those restaurants already started on their own, and the consumers responded to it in the context of this national crisis.
Here is a piece of legislation that the administration is continuing to work in full faith with the stakeholders on. Why not let them continue. It is a major piece of prevention. It is a major piece of public health.
I have been in the restaurant business long enough to remember when Mothers Against Drunk Driving brought their issues to the restaurant industry and said that we should do something about the epidemic of drunk driving deaths. We did. The restaurant industry put up a struggle and thought it would be the end of it.
I have been in the business long enough to remember secondhand smoke, where similarly people said: This will be the end of us.
I know how hard it is to keep a restaurant open. It is one of the most daunting things you can do in life. I know the importance of them in a community where more and more Americans with two-income households rely on restaurants and dining out to provide for their families. Therein lies part of our crisis.
The restaurant business responded when we had drunk driving issues. It responded again in secondhand smoke. Many of us can remember when you would walk into a restaurant and you were engulfed in smoke. We know what the public health dangers of that were. We know how we have reduced that exposure and led the world.
Here is another occasion where the United States--and I know in California, we led the world, and it is working. I will say that you can remedy, as somebody with my background, the conflicts between public health.
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Mr. DeSAULNIER. I urge my colleagues--given the experience I have had and others, and the urgency of the issue when it comes to public health and the future of this country--to vote ``no.''
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