Fast food: Protecting the poor from Big Macs

The Los Angeles City Council apparently thinks some of us are too dumb to choose our own food, said Joe R. Hicks in the Los Angeles Times. The council last week voted unanimously to impose a one-year moratorium on opening new McDonald’s, Burger King, and other fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles—a 32-square-mile area that is home to some 500,000 people, most of them poor and minority. Noting that South L.A. already contains some 400 fast-food joints, supporters claim the moratorium will make space for more healthful restaurants and grocery stores and therefore help reduce the city’s soaring rates of obesity and diabetes. The sponsors’ intentions may be fine, but let’s be clear about what’s going on here. “The finger-wagging inference is that poor black or Latino residents need government to limit their food options or else they’ll make themselves sick.” We’re no longer shocked by politicians who believe “government has an answer for all things.” But this unprecedented expansion of the “nanny state” doesn’t protect citizens as much as it “infantilizes” them.

Get used to it, said William Saletan in Slate.com. “What we’re looking at, essentially, is the beginning of food zoning.” L.A. and other cities already limit cigarettes and liquor sales, to say nothing of sex shops and “scummy motels,” and proponents see this as “the logical next step.” As for the complaint that it’s paternalistic and even racist to impose this restriction on the poor, backers have a clever retort. They say they are merely trying to counter “food apartheid”—the phenomenon by which more upscale, healthful food outlets avoid poor neighborhoods. With New York and other cities now considering similar approaches, we could soon get to the point when people munching on French fries will feel just as ostracized as today’s sidewalk smokers.

The biggest problem with the war on fast food, said Trice Whitefield in the Oklahoma City Oklahoman, is that it misses the real cause of the nation’s obesity epidemic. “Dietary scaremongers have monopolized the public’s attention,” but recent studies suggest it is our lack of exercise that most explains our flabby state. Fifty years ago, “most Americans ate a high-fat, high-cholesterol, and high-sugar diet,” but fewer people became dangerously overweight because they did more physical labor and generally relied less on machines. In the fight against obesity, “food may be a sensational target. It’s just not the right one.”

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