Time Essay: A Guide to American Restaurant Menus

Bon appetit, consumers. Help is on the way. That inescapable roadside institution, McDonald's, has been fined $5,000 for mislabeling frozen orange juice as freshly squeezed, and calling a concoction "maple syrup" that had nowhere enough maple to stand up to the name. In addition to folks at the Golden Arches, Baskin-Robbins, the International House of Pancakes and Hamburger Hamlets have all been foiled by a Los Angeles campaign to enforce honesty in eateries: it is now against the law, for example, to describe a nondairy product as "cream," or lower-grade beef as "prime." Like truth inadvertising and truth in lending, truth in menus is catching on. Chicago issues its own menu guidlines: "'Baked ham' should not have been boiled." Councilwoman Carol Greitzer of NEw York City has introduced a bill of fair fare that would outlaw such representations as describing an ordinary spud as an Idaho potato and an ordinary crustacean as a Maine lobster.

Alas, even if Ms. Greitzer's bill becomes law, it will be a while before the unwary diner-out is fully protected from Menuese—a peculiar subbranch of American Englihs, rich in mouth-watering adjectives, that is designed both to entice and to obfuscate. In the interests of consumerism, TIME herewith offers its own guide to some of the most common plats du jour found on U.S. restaurant menus—and what they really mean:

MENU TRANSLATION

Breakfast

Farmer's Choice. Farm-fresh eggs; creamery butter; hearty Columbian java; stacks of extra chrisp toast with rasher of Canadian bacon

Ninety-two percent egg white, 7% whey with calcium and sodium caseinates, leeithin and vegetable mono-and di-glycerides, cellulose, xanthan gums, artificial colors, aluminum sulfate, ferric orthophosphate, zinc sulfate, calcium pantothenate; last night's reheated coffee; slightly scorched day-old bread, I slice sandwich ham

Waist Watcher's Selection. Low-calorie, citrus-rich, jammed with vitamins and colorful taste thrills.

Five canned grapefruit slices: 1 slice day-old bread, toasted: ½ scoop cottage cheese and maraschino cherry—refrigerated for 24 hours, causing the top of the cheese to turn pink.

Kiddies' Special. Yumptious eats for the youg and the young in heart.

Spoonful powdered orange drink added to glass of tap water, bowl of puff-milled corn, sugar, corn syrup, molases, salt, partially hydrogenated coconut oil, sodium ascorbate, BHA added to preserve product freshness

Luncheon

Salisbur Steak

Hamburger

Bifteck à la Cuisinart

Hamburger

O.K. Corral Man-Handler. Finest ground sirloin fit to tame the wildest slaphappetite

Hamburger

Hamburger

Leftovers

Deep Sea Sensation. With the briny tang of the Atlantic artfully combined with the aroma of the country garden

One can dark-meat tuna on lettuce leaf, 3 slices greenhouse tomato with all the harmful flavor removed, 1 onion cut in the shape of a ribbon, 1 radish cut in the shape of a radish

The Burt Reynolds Macho Club Sandwich

Processed turkey, processed ham, processed cheese, iceberg lttuce, cole slaw and mayonnaise. Toothpicks hold all this between 3 slices of white bread with crusts

The Farrah Fawcett-Majors Ladyfinger Sandwich