Here are some excerpts from the main article. And don’t ask me why the fonts are all different, it’s not letting me fix them.
Standing before the ticket vending machine at the entrance to a new Tokyo lunch outlet, hungry patrons have the option of buying scales to weigh themselves along with their meal selection.
The button choices on the machine represent the concept of the restaurant: It’s designed to make you, all at once, hyper aware of how healthy you will be for the next 30 minutes while eating your meal, with a reminder of how much healthier you could be the rest of the time.
Such is the tug and pull dining experience at an establishment opened by Tanita Corp., a healthcare equipment maker that is also behind the 2010 best-selling cookbooks featuring full-course meals that contain only about 500 calories. On Wednesday, the Osaka-based manufacturer of body scales and body mass index measuring devices opened Tanita Dining Hall in Tokyo’s Marunouchi business district, the restaurant incarnation of the popular low-calorie, low-sodium recipe books based on menus served at the firm’s employee cafeteria.
There are two set course options. One is taken from a recipe book, and the other is made exclusively for the restaurant. The set-up is constant – a main dish, two sides, soup and white rice.
T Just like the recipe books, flat screens facing out along the glass wall at Tanita display the calorie count with corresponding pictures of the meals on the menu that week.
Full article found here:
Tokyo’s Next Food Craze: The 500 Calorie Lunch? – Japan Real Time – WSJ.
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