Fat Fighters
Posted on July 23rd, 2008 in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
The Los Angeles City Council has passed a one-year moratorium on new fast food restaurants in South LA, an attempt to fight obesity among the largely African-American population of that neighborhood.
I sympathize with the effort. Poor communities often have an obesity problem that is aided and abetted by fast food. (I see it in my own Soha—south of Harlem—neighborhood, as probably one out of every six businesses on 125th Street is a KFC, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, and so on.)
But won’t this just be a boon to the existing fast food joints, who’ll now have less competition than they would have otherwise?
Rather than a restriction on new businesses, I’d prefer to see some sort of economic support for businesses that actually sell fresh fruits and vegetables, which are notoriously hard to buy in the inner-city…..
Of course, whether or not poor people would actually buy healthy food if it were available is another question. A friend of mine used to lease ATMs to bodegas, often in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and used to have a lot of dealings with the owners of those little markets. The owners told him that, even when they stocked fruits and vegetables, their customers wouldn’t buy produce; they preferred candy, potato chips, soda, Twinkies and so on.
3 Responses
7/23/2008 11:36 am
I agree that a restriction won’t do much good, especially if it’s only in place for a year. Produce is a tough business and the profit margins are incredibly low (hovering around 2%), which probably explains why you won’t see many local produce markets in cities where the cost of real estate is prohibitively high.
Public health campaigns haven’t been too successful in this area reaching lower socio-economic populations because healthy food costs more than fast food (although that isn’t cheap either, except for KFC). It doesn’t help that even the social service programs like WIC barely give enough money to afford mercury-tainted tuna, non-organic milk, etc. for new moms and babies falling below the poverty line. It’s just another way the rich folk keep the poor in their place.
7/23/2008 10:58 pm
So here’s a socialist idea from this ordinarily libertarian soul. Bring back home economics classes, except now use them to brainwash kids that obesity is really, really a bad thing, uncool like cigarettes, will kill you, ruin your social life, one cheeseburger is enough, etc. Any attempt to restrict fast food at the sales point will just make kids want it more, and the concept of teaching 10-year-olds to love raw broccoli seems a bit fantastical. Why wouldn’t this be an appropriate role for government, at least as appropriate as saying what kinds of food shops people can open? Most kids are in state-run schools for years. Rather than picking up the costs of their morbid obesity, diabetes, etc., later on, why not use the time we have them as a captive audience to teach them to be responsible about their weight, for their own good and for the good of society? It would be more useful than the sex abstinence campaigning for sure.
7/27/2008 9:43 am
One reason this doesn’t happen is that schools often take on corporate sponsors, such as Coke. I read a decent thesis on the topic in Hist & Lit.
The other problem is that one cheeseburger meal isn’t ‘enough’ — it’s already too much.
Inconveniently, too, weight issues lack the super-direct link to poor health that cigarettes had.
Fundamentally I think the best schools can do is require everyone to eat excellent food in the cafeteria, and not go out….
SE