My wife and I discussed the plan before the Los Angeles City Council to limit fast food restaurants in the city as we drove back from my appointment with the ophthalmologist, my dilated eyes squinted to slits to avoid the glare.
As America gets fatter, policymakers are seeking creative approaches to legislating health. They may have entered the school cafeteria — and now they’re eyeing your neighborhood.
Amid worries of an obesity epidemic and its related illnesses, including high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, Los Angeles officials, among others around the country, are proposing to limit new fast-food restaurants — a tactic that could be called health zoning.
The City Council will be asked this fall to consider an up to two-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South L.A., a part of the city where fast food is at least as much a practicality as a preference.
“The people don’t want them, but when they don’t have any other options, they may gravitate to what’s there,” said Councilwoman Jan Perry, who proposed the ordinance in June, and whose district includes portions of South L.A. that would be affected by the plan.
Don’t want them? I guess that’s why they do so much business. Is the Hamburglar now prowling LA, dragging unwilling customers into McDonalds?
Apparently no one in the LA City Council has been to a grocery store lately. Grocery stores are now fast food restaurants, too, and, unless the LACC bans grocery stores as well as Kentucky Fried Chicken or limits their ability to sell prepared food their ordinance won’t have much effect. They’ll just be encouraging grocery stores to sell more prepared food.
If it does have an effect it will be to increase unemployment among some of their poorest citizens, those who depend on entry-level fast food jobs.
Why do so many people eat at fast food restaurants? Because they’re working, they spend too much of their time commuting, it’s convenient, and they don’t particularly want to cook. The LA City Council might think about dealing with the causes rather than the effects.
This is of a piece with Chicago’s foie gras ban. Evidently neither city has a crime problem or lousy schools or decaying infrastructure. Nothing but spare time on their hands.
Another wrong solution to the right problem. It is undeniable that America has a serious, and deteriorating, obesity problem – along with a lot of other countries, but probably worse than most.
One of the reasons is agricultural subsidies – for corn (encourages the use of high-fructose corn syrup), dairy products, and probably beef production; and even if the last isn’t true the cheap corn encourages the use of feedlots instead of letting the cattle out on the range, which produces beef with a higher fat content and that fat is more saturated.
Another is the fact that America allows the use in agriculture of growth-promoting drugs banned in Europe.
I’m a Brit, but spent a few weeks in a fairly typical town in New Jersey some time ago. One thing that struck me was the low nutritional quality of what I have to assume was reasonably typical American food. For example, when going down the aisle containing breakfast cereals it was literally impossible to find any cereal that wasn’t at least 25% sugar. Muesli? Forget it!
The real problem is the same as it is for a number of other issues. Spineless and/or venal congressmen that allow themselves to be bought by the junk food lobby, and similar people that allow themselves to be bought (this time mostly for votes) by the agribusiness lobby and therefore perpetuate the distortions allowed by subsidies.
In short, LA city council couldn’t achieve these objectives even if they should be trying.