The Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance banning fast food restaurants from South LA—the area that has the lowest average income and the highest percentage of people of color. With 45% of the restaurants serving fast food, the area is the highest in the city. The Northeast around Pasadena comes in second with 33%. The hip and wealthy Westside has the lowest at 19%.
The fast food ban is based on two ideas—one right, the other not. South LA has the highest rate of obesity in the city. The conventional thinking is that obesity is a disease. In that way of thinking, the high rate in South LA is a public health crisis caused by unhealthy eating and lack of physical activity. So take away fast food and you help reduce obesity. This idea is wrong because obesity is a symptom, not a disease. And while unhealthy food contributes to that symptom, fast food should be banned because it’s unhealthy, because it lacks nutrient density, because it causes malnutrition. Obesity, on the other hand, is the consequence of stress—psychosocial caused by social inequity and physiological caused by toxic exposures, fast food only one of many.
However, the good idea for the ban is that it is entirely appropriate for the City Council to modify the built environment specifically to attain a positive public health effect. The Council member responsible for the moratorium, Jan Perry, represents a portion of South LA. She worked for six years to pass the moratorium because “there are not a lot of food choices in South LA.” In addition to the moratorium on fast food restaurants, a separate piece of legislation provides for actively encouraging grocery stores and restaurants with table service to move into the neighborhood.
To no one’s surprise, the National Restaurant Association objected to the moratorium as did conservatives concerned about government “meddling into the very minutiae of what people are putting in their mouths.”
To the extent that eating fast food contributes to obesity and other health problems, it is an adaptation to stress —just like the body’s other adaptations that show up as stress-related illness such as heart disease and diabetes. Malnutrition from fast food contributes to the body’s already stressed state. So changing the built environment to reduce exposure to malnourishing foods and to increase exposures to nutrient dense whole foods is a good thing.
Unfortunately, halting the spread of fast food restaurants and promoting grocery stores and restaurants with table service in South LA is a weak contribution to reducing malnutrition. The problem that needs to be solved is changing the entire food infrastructure in the area. But a more fundamental problem needs to be addressed: why does it make sense for people in South LA to use fast food as a food source in disproportionate numbers? The answer is not that they don’t know what’s good for them. Instead look to their rationality in the face of a specific political economy of which the food infrastructure is only a part.
Posing the problem in this way gives us the opportunity to change what we mean by a healthy built environment. Instead of being forced to protect ourselves from health risks posed by fast food, actively shaping our food infrastructure as part of our community’s political economy could enable us to create health benefits.
There’s no doubt that we have to take action as communities to protect ourselves from a wide variety of health risks. But that fact is not a result of the natural order of things. Who gets to build what and where is a consequence of who has money and political power. It’s also a consequence of how we as a community regulate our political economy. It’s a consequence of a culture that celebrates the virtues of the so-called free market in which the default regulation is: you can change our built environment unless it turns out to be harmful.
Instead, the correct default regulation should be: you can change our built environment, but only if you can prove it’s safe. Better yet, the default should be: you can change our built environment, but only if it makes our community a healthier place to live. Otherwise, go away.
