In my recent post on the Academy of the Sierras, I promised an exposé on the fattiness of restaurant food. Here's what I meant:

The problem with restaurants for the person watching their weight is twofold. First, the portions are far too large. Yes, all portions - I'm not just talking about inhuman feed baggeries like The Cheesecake Factory here. Second, a lot of the food is a lot fattier and more caloric than one would expect, given what it looks like. For the average chubby eater who wants to eat something tasty and relatively restrained (that is, they refuse to be corraled by the designated 'low fat' options), restaurants are therefore terrifying obstacle courses. You don't believe me? Well, how about the Chicken Tarragon and Field Greens Sandwich at Au Bon Pain, a nationally growing chain of supposedly artisanal "bakeries". Sounds relatively healthy right - chicken breast, herbs, and greenery? And it should be. But in reality, as you'll see if you click here, the sandwich has an astounding 800 calories and 42 grams of fat. That, you should know, is 240 calories and 12 grams of fat more than a Big Mac, almost twice as many calories and more than twice the fat of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and even beats a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This is serious stuff.

The real question, however, is how they managed to make a relatively innocuous sandwich that outrageously fatty. So I set out to make my own the other day, using FoodTV's calorie and fat counter as a guide.

I started by grilling a chicken breast on my cast iron grill, setting off the smoke alarm, and using 141 calories and 3 Grams of fat - I shouldn't even count that much, because Au Bon Pain clearly uses less chicken, but let's go with it. The quarter tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil I brushed on the chicken was more than enough to make it crisp and juicy, and brought me up another 50 calories and 4 grams of fat, rounding up. A quarter of ABP's large foccacia gets me another 2.25 grams of fat and 185 calories. That brings me to a running total of 376 calories and 9.25 grams of fat. The tarragon and the field greens are essentially calorie-less, but let's throw another 50 on for good measure, and we're still at a mere 426. There isn't any cheese in the sandwich (I asked) so all that leaves is mayonnaise. For my sandwich to equal ABP's in fat and calories, I would have to add an astonishing 3 tablespoons of Hellman's (100 calories/11g of fat per tb), way more than I've ever put on a sandwich, and way more than ABP adds. If you added a little mustard and one full tablespoon of mayo instead, you'd still be at about 20 grams of fat, and under 600 calories for a clearly larger sandwich. So how does ABP do it? I haven't the slightest idea.

But what I do know is that that one sandwich contains more than half the fat and a substantial portion of the calories someone should eat in a day. Now, I'm not a calorie counter, usually. Cheeses, cream, great swathes of pork with back fat - I eat them all. But that's because when I cook at home I know exactly how much and what I'm eating, and I have no reason to eat the entire plate if I know I've had enough. But at a restaurant, uninhibited by the need to keep some for tomorrow, encouraged by the sign of roasted chicken and field greens, I'll eat that entire pitifully unsatisfying sandwich, over and over again. And then wonder why the pounds keep coming on and on. In any case, the above is why I don't often go to restaurants, and haven't since I discovered how I personally ought to eat 7 years ago. I don't claim that I've got all the answers - but when people wonder where our obesity problem is coming from, this is at least one source.