When buying processed food in the grocery store it is fairly common for what appears to be one serving to actually be two servings. Thus, I always check how many servings there are per container before assuming I know how many calories it contains. However, until tonight, I did not realize it was necessary to do this with restaurant food also.

I’ve started a science fiction book club at the Erie library. It meets at 6:45 which doesn’t allow time to go home and eat before coming back for the book club. Because of this, Jaeger (who also comes), usually picks up take-out for us to eat before the meeting. Last Monday, I asked Jaeger to get take-out from Pei Wei. I’ve eaten there once before and thought the food was pretty good. More importantly, they provide nutritional information on their website. Before giving Jaeger my order, I perused the nutritional information looking for a non-mushroom vegetarian dish that seemed to have a good calorie level. All the dishes seemed low on the calorie side but I assumed that the portions would be relatively small.

Jaeger arrived and I was quite surprised by the large amount of food I received. It seemed way too much food for the amount of calories that was purportedly in it. However, I shrugged and started eating. About half way through I was full. Normally, when food is in front of me, I continue eating until it’s gone. I know it’s not a good habit but I’ve had a hard time breaking it. For some reason, I was able to stop eating that night once I was full. Jaeger ate a little bit of it and then we took the rest home for leftovers.

Thursday night Jaeger is either at BLUG or Hacking Society so I have the house to myself (I love my husband dearly but it’s also nice to be alone sometimes ). On these nights, I rarely bother cooking something for myself and instead have leftovers. I saw the Blazing Noodles from Pei Wei in the fridge and decided that it would make a good meal. I have a nutrition program that I fanatically use to enter in everything I eat. I hadn’t decided what to eat Monday until I was away from the house so I had never entered in the Pei Wei food. Tonight, before eating it, I pulled up the nutritional information and started entering it in my program. I had already noticed that the noodle dish did not include the calories for the actual noodles and so knew that to get the true calorie count of the dish I had to combine the calories for “Blazing Noodles” as well as the calories for plain “Rice Noodles.” That is a little sneaky but it allows for more flexibility if you decide to customize the order. I entered the nutritional information column by column until I got to the very last column which I had missed on Monday, “Servings (per dish).” Suddenly, all was clear. My portion size seemed too large because it was actually two servings, not one. While I applaud Pei Wei for having nutritional information available, I feel that including two “servings” in one “dish” is deceptive.