Fast food makes a big fat mistake

Whenever Arnold Schwarzenegger signs a big bill, he’s always smiling a big smile in front of a big crowd. But vetoing bills happens off-camera. He vetoed one major environmental bill on a Sunday evening; for all I know, he did it at home in his jammies with “60 Minutes” on the flat-screen.

There’s no ceremony to a veto, which is a crying shame. What a governor rejects deserves as much fanfare as what he signs. The people who lobbied to kill the doomed bill should be clustered behind him for the photo op and then pocket their souvenir signing pens.

If there’d been a veto ceremony for SB 120, all the pens would have gone into two pockets: those of the California Restaurant Assn. and the California Chamber of Commerce. The bill would have required chain restaurants of 15 outlets or more to post some combination of information about calories, saturated fat, trans fats, carbs and sodium on each menu item. A knowledgeable diner, so the theory goes, is a healthy diner -- even if that just means ordering the small fries instead of the super-size.

The chamber put this bill on its list of “job killers.” Job killer? Not even job kneecapping. Would McDonald’s, Taco Bell, In-N-Out Burger, Carl’s Jr. and Del Taco leave their home state because they have to put up a poster? Did some focus group worry that some customer would see that a Carl’s Jr. Western bacon burger, medium fries and chocolate shake contain 2,210 calories and 3,250 milligrams of sodium and run screaming to Whole Foods?

This one-columnist focus group wondered about that too. The answer I found is no.

Nor do I believe the argument that the data are too tricky and expensive to figure out, given that some fast-food chains have already posted them on their websites, and some have installed them in their outlets, like the Baskin-Robbins near Cal State LA.

The McDonald’s website nutrition chart prints out at 12 pages -- but I couldn’t find it in any of the outlets I went to, from El Monte to L.A. to Studio City. On the Carl’s Jr. website, you can “build” a custom meal and the computer will figure out nutrition values. But at an actual Carl’s Jr., like the one in Universal City, the posted nutritional content hangs where you wouldn’t see it until after you’ve ordered. Yet a large, handsomely framed picture of Carl Karcher and the missus is almost as prominently displayed as the “A” cleanliness rating.

At a Burger King in Highland Park, there’s a huge ad for a triple burger “so big and beefy it just may run for governor.” The nutritional chart is posted next to the cash register; you have to be blessed with 20/10 vision to read that the governor-sized burger has 1,130 calories and 74 grams of fat.

But no one does read it, the guy at the counter told me. It’s all right there, the down and dirty on fat, sodium and carbs, just about everything the vetoed bill wanted on display -- but who’s paying attention? Nobody that I saw.

At a Burger King in East Pasadena, Pat Howard had come in from Thousand Oaks to spend time with her grandsons. This was a rare treat. She used to work for McDonald’s, putting restaurants in hospitals and putting healthy food in restaurants. “The fruit just got rotten, and the soup got cold. The doctors were the worst -- they bought all that fast food.”

Nobody comes to these places to eat healthy, she believes. Did she check out the prominently displayed nutrition chart before ordering? She looked at me like I’d asked whether she ordered caviar on her chicken sandwich.

This is why the restaurant lobbyists should have told Schwarzenegger, “Come on, sign that bill!” Heck, they should have sponsored it themselves.

So they spend a few bucks on signs and lose some calorie-conscious eaters. Like the warning on a pack of cigarettes, a nutrition chart puts consumers on notice. If they don’t take notice, pig out and then sue -- as several have, saying McDonald’s didn’t tell them its food was fattening -- then Burger Inc. is probably off the hook. It was all right there in black and white, Your Honor.

Frittelli’s is a gourmet doughnut shop in Beverly Hills -- a boutique, not a chain, and its doughnuts are free of trans fat, made with exotic vanillas and chocolates. But it’s in Beverly Hills, where women may freak out if their dress size approaches their shoe size. So can a walk-in customer find out what else goes into those delices? I called: No. Pat Howard is right. Most people just don’t want to know. Maybe not even one of Frittelli’s regulars, a man who reportedly comes in every week for the green apple fritters, a man who’s been a health nut all his life. Some fellow named Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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patt.morrison@latimes.com