7/30/2008

Los Angeles

I see that Los Angeles has put a moratorium on new construction of fast food restaurants in certain neigborhoods of the city. I've been looking for the regulation, and have had no luck.

The reason I'm looking for it is that I can't understand (a) how they plan to differentiate fast food restaurants from any other kind of restaurant. (b) why they think having a bunch of fast food restaurant is less healthy than a bunch of sit-down restaurants and (c) what they want people who live in these places to eat.

On (a), I rather suspect that if you were to open a little burger chain in Los Angeles, the regulation wouldn't apply to you (though, prove me wrong). But why not? Mcdonald's offers much healthier options than, say, Five Napkin Burger. As for (b), substituting Bennigan's (well, perhaps not Bennigan's) in place of McDonald's doesn't strike me as having any particular health benefits, unless the benefit consists of culling everything affordable out of the neighborhood, leaving residents to mill pathetically around places they can't pay for before heading home to cook with ingredients they can't buy in their neighborhood for lack of grocery stores. This doesn't strike me as a policy likely to improve outcomes.

1 comment:

PG said...

The LA Times story provides more details.