Let Them Eat Salads

How long will it take for this to migrate to Madison? The City of Los Angeles is looking to halt the spread of fast food restaurants in poor neighborhoods.

The war on fat has just crossed a major red line. The Los Angeles City Council has passed an ordinance prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people.

We're not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We're talking about banning the sale of food to adults. Treating French fries like cigarettes or liquor.

The author of the piece at Slate, William Saletan, notes that supporters of the legislation point to a higher concentration of fast food joints in poorer neighborhoods and that some of them "call this state of affairs 'food apartheid.'" With all the racial overtones of the word "apartheid", Saletan says:

Opening a McDonald's in South-Central L.A. is not government-enforced racial discrimination. But telling McDonald's it can open franchises only in the white part of town—what do you call that?

USC sociologist and author of The Gospel of Food said in an interview with Salon last year:

…the poorer you are, the more likely it is you will have food regulations imposed upon you. That's not to say these regulations are bad overall, but we should look at who's affected and in which ways. We should do that as well when we criticize eateries that provide low-cost meals to people on limited income. The fast-food industry deserves a lot of criticism and I level it in the book, but at the same time, to be able to get a complete or nearly complete meal for a few bucks, with distractions for the children thrown in at no extra cost, is not in itself a bad thing.

If you want to understand why people of low income tend to be more overweight and obese, it's a complicated story. But we shouldn't leave out the effect that food insecurity itself has; in the book I go into this in some detail, but basically there's a parallel pattern to binge eating, where people who periodically run low on food resemble people who are on diets. When food stamps run out, or the kids' medical expenses take precedence, or the local food bank shuts down or runs out of food, you're not going to eat a lot. And when food becomes available again, you binge.

We know that this pattern, this binge pattern, contributes to overweight and obesity. Yet we've come to have this odd notion that it's what people eat, it's what low-income people eat, rather than what they don't eat, or when they don't eat, or which options are not available to them, that explains their weight.

Saletan ends his article by saying that "the majority leader of New York's city council wants to adopt food zoning, and several cities have phoned L.A.'s planning department to request copies of the ordinance."

With a recent report on increasing obesity rates amongst African-Americans here in The Land of Cheese, I wouldn't be surprised if one or two of those cities who phone the L.A. planning department was from Wisconsin.