Don't Count on Caltner

                There have been many very interesting projects shown this year in contemporary moral issues that address an incredibly wide range of topics. For the most part, all of these presentations have been exceedingly well done and as such, it has been difficult to choose which two on which to do my blog posts. In the end, my choices came down to which two projects for which I could think of the most suggestions. It is not that they are necessarily inherently bad projects, but in a group with such outstanding projects it is easiest to write my posts on the ones that I could think of things to say about other than “good job.”
                The first one I am going to write about is Calntner, or the Calorie Counter project. The main purpose of this project is to fight the obesity epidemic in America, and the core conceit of this initiative is the idea that a large portion of America’s obesity problem stems from its high levels of fast food consumption. The device itself is a thumbprint scanner at the register of fast food restaurants that keeps track of how many calories worth of fast food the user has eaten that week and gives reminders as they approach a given threshold. It’s an interesting idea for combatting obesity, but there are a few wrinkles with the design that would need to be worked out before it could work. For example, the question of how to get the device in the restaurants in the first place is one that definitely needs to be addressed. This device, by its nature, would potentially drive away customers who would otherwise eat at that establishment if they were not reminded of how much fast food they had been eating. Thus, it would be incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible, to persuade a fast food joint to install the device. In class, it was argued that not having one would be equivalent to admitting that they care more about money than they do about the health of their customers, but given the statistics they presented on fast food and health concerns, it seems that merely owning a fast food restaurant is saying the exact same thing. The only way in which this device could potentially be used is after receiving a mandate from the government to be installed in every restaurant, but that fails to address one of the biggest contributors to fast food consumption and that is poverty. Eating healthy, simply put, is expensive. This is why, as mentioned in the presentations, many adult Americans find it easier to do their taxes that to eat healthily. Even after being installed by law, I see its impact on obesity as being minimal simply because many Americans do not have the luxury of saying no to fast food. There is potentially a place in the world for such a calorie counting machine, but these questions would definitely need to be addressed before it could be effectively utilized.