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Stephen Speranza for The New York Times
New York City on Friday agreed to postpone enforcement of a rule requiring restaurants, convenience stores and other establishments to post calorie counts for prepared food. The move came in response to an industry lawsuit that was supported by the federal government.
The city said that it would wait to enforce the calorie posting rules until May, when the Food and Drug Administration is scheduled to put its own rules on calorie labeling into effect.
The federal rules were required by Congress in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, but the Food and Drug Administration repeatedly delayed their implementation.
They were finally supposed to go into effect in May but the Trump administration decided to wait an additional year. At that point the city, which had been an early advocate of calorie labeling in restaurants, said that it would act on its own. The city’s Health Department said that its own labeling rules, which were already on the books, would take effect immediately and that, after a phase-in period, it would begin enforcing them this month.
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In response, a group of trade organizations representing convenience stores and restaurants filed a federal lawsuit in Manhattan seeking to block the city from enforcing it before the federal rule went into effect. This month, the federal government filed court papers backing the industry and arguing that the federal labeling law bars cities and other jurisdictions from enacting calorie labeling rules that are not identical to the federal rules. Lawyers for the federal government said that included the date the rules were to go into effect.
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