L.A. bans fast food

South Los Angeles has recently banned the opening of any new fast food restaurants for a year. The measure also includes an emphasis (and funding) to encourage the opening of grocery stores and sit down restaurants (both are historically far less prevalent in low income areas). You can read the NYT's report on it here. This is, to say the least, excellent news. It shows the next step in understanding just what fast food is: a huge part of the problem with our current health failures, and just what it's not: the entire problem. Fast food, as some well educated and articulate writers love to point out, provides a service to people who want it. You can get fast, cheap food, often feeding a family for about the price of one person's meal anywhere else. But part of the problem is the lack of alternatives. This measure helps ensure that more grocery stores are built while fast food restaurants are frozen. (I'm far less excited about the sit down restaurant part as most low-end sit down restaurants are not much better than fast food, and sometimes actually worse as they give the perception of health without any improvement.) Access to grocery stores is very important as it in turn provides access to whole foods -- fresh produce being the most important.

But to me, another incredibly important aspect of this turn of events is optics. Finally we are starting to call fast food out for what it is. Laws throughout our country protect fast food regardless of how dangerous it has proven to our health. But as communities target transfat, deceptive calories, soda, and other health concerns linked to food, it is finally time to turn our gaze towards what represents the worst of the worst and to start to hold such companies responsible for the damage they cause. This is the first step -- acknowledging that fast food companies are an enormous part of the problem, and that we won't just sit back and let it continue.