Wannarant.com The place to let off steam.

I don't eat at chain restaurants often: I find the quality of food to be generally mediocre and the whole experience to be somewhat insulting. So it is always refreshing to discover that my instincts are correct, though I confess that this discovery has left me suspicious of ALL restaurant food.

When a vegetable is described in a menu as "steamed", I expect it to be exactly that: Cooked as a result of being placed in the steam of very hot water. Unfortunately, chain restaurant Ruby Tuesday (at least in America) has a different understanding of what "steamed" means when they sell us their "Fresh Steamed Broccoli". You see, when I looked at the nutrition information for this dish (available on the Ruby Tuesday website), I learned that an order of "Fresh Steamed Broccoli" has seven grams of fat. I said to myself "Self, how could this be? Broccoli has no fat, and water (from which steam is produced) has no fat. How can fat magically appear when the ingredients themselves contain no fat?" Clearly something is amiss.

Now while there is nothing inherently wrong with dietary fat, the fact is that fat contains more calories per gram than, say, broccoli. If someone reads the menu and sees "Fresh Steamed Broccoli", they might well assume that they are eating broccoli that has been, well, steamed, a cooking method that is not supposed to add any calories. However, it is quite clear that at some point in the preparation of Ruby Tuesday's "Fresh Steamed Broccoli", fat is being added (though it is not clear if there is an additional cooking step, or whether the fat is being added after cooking). Thus, a person who is ordering "Fresh Steamed Broccoli" at Ruby Tuesday is getting far more calories than s/he might otherwise expect to get in this dish.

Since I am following a slimming regimen myself, I am now extremely paranoid about eating food in restaurants. After all, if a straightforward term like "steamed" can't be trusted, what can?