The Los Angeles council has just passed on ordinance banning new fast food restaurants in a poor section of South/Central LA. William Saletan calls it Food Apartheid and writes:
We’re not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing
calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We’re talking about
banning the sale of food to adults….It’s true that food options in low-income neighborhoods are, on
average, worse than the options in wealthier neighborhoods. But
restricting options in low-income neighborhoods is a disturbingly
paternalistic way of solving the problem.
Milton Friedman once said:
I don’t think the state has any more right to tell me what what to put in my mouth than it has to tell me what can come out of my mouth.
Friedman was talking about drug prohibition but today the target could just as easily be food prohibition.
Hat tip on the Friedman quote to Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek.
When french fries are outlawed, only outlaws will have french fries….
Amazing how complete control over a person’s most basic daily functions us preferable to doing anything to move society towards a better understanding of their own health.
This is land use regulation – meaning if there are already lots of fast food places, there should not be more land zoned/permitted for that use. Once we get rid of gated communities, I might buy into the idea of absolute immunity for all from land use regulation. I am not holding my breath.
More tyranny from the left!
How do the define fast food legally? What about Subway, or JambaJuice, or some other semi-healthy place?
Yeah, seems like banning transfats would be a better use of their laws.
What does this portend for innovation in the food industry? Shouldn’t we expect profit-seeking individuals and businesses to develop new, legal forms of crap, only slightly more suitable for human consumption than “fast food”? As a local down here, I’m excited to see what sort of refuse is concocted to fill the void.
This is just a zoning regulation to restrict new fast food restaurants in an area that already has many. Fast food restaurants have a bunch of local externalities. Some believe the “toxic environment” of ubiquitous fast food restaurants injures health. If you don’t agree, fine, but at some point even the more obvious blight of signage and parking lots would merit zoning. No wealthy residential neighborhood would tolerate the concentration of fast food restaurants you can find in many low-income urban neighborhoods. Saletan’s cavalier use of the term “apartheid” is unnecessarily shrill, and if you think about it, the analogy doesn’t work.
Potential unintended consequences:
1. People will drive farther to buy fast food, thus using more petrol on the way and causing environmental damage.
2A. Rich people will get upset about poor people having to drive into their neighbourhoods for fast food.
2B. More fast food restaurants in rich neighbourhoods will lower property values.
I wonder what will happen once McDonalds and BK and the rest start offering full service (but still crappy service via crackheads) restaurants in the area in question?
Also, Micheal Foody is right, sit down restaurants aren’t any healthier, especially at low price points which are presumably the closest substitute. Anyone who has ever eaten at a greasy spoon (i.e a diner) knows how ludicrous this legislation is even on its alleged merits.
As a resident of LA, I am also pretty confident that this will boost sales of illegally made street food such as “bacon dogs” by vendors who likely never passed a food sanitation course, and who cook the food as well as handle the unsanitary money used to pay for it, amongst other unclean practices. (The dopes who cook at fast food places haven’t passed those courses either, but they must have someone present who has).
Seriously guys?
1. “Trivial freedoms.” There are no such thing. If you allow your government to take away one freedom, who are you to complain when they take another? And another?
2. What’s healthier, eating McDonald’s food, or not eating? The reason there is such a proliferation of these restaurants in poor neighborhoods is, the food is cheap and filling. You can get an entire meal for $6, whereas just a sandwich and a “nicer” fast food place like Cosi costs $10. Poor people can’t afford that. This measure won’t improve health. But it just might increase the rate of starvation.
3. The monopoly pricing issue has already been addressed.
4. And finally, the lack of fast food restaurants in wealthy neighborhoods has little to do with “tolerance” and much to do with preferences. Few people would rather eat McDonald’s than say a nicer chain such a Ruth’s Chris. Rich people have the means to choose Ruth’s Chris with little detriment to their finances and thus McDonald’s in their neighborhoods are not profitable. But in a place where people need cheap food, McDonald’s helps them get some kind of nourishment they can afford, and they help McDonald’s turn a profit.
- This ordinance, like many others in the past (rent control, minimum wage, price ceilings…) does nothing but harm the constituents it is purported to help.
David more eloquently explained my last point better than I did. If only he had posted a couple of minutes earlier….
Although there don’t appear to be any within its city limits, there are about 15 McDonalds, a half-dozen Burger Kings and an equal number of Taco Bells within a 5-mile radius of exclusive (and expensive) Beverly Hills. The rich, like the poor, do support a large concentration of fast food restaurants, as long as that concentration is not too close for comfort.
It’s an inappropriately paternalistic approach to what is nevertheless a problem that must be addressed. As a South Bronx resident who who wants to live a long and healthy life, I go into Manhattan for anything remotely edible. The vast majority of people in my community–the poorest Congressional district in the USA–are too poor to afford anything but McDonald’s, and also too poor to afford health care mitigating the medical consequences of such a diet.
I’m smart enough to know better, and I work hard enough to afford better. I long to compel my neighbors to do the same, or even to open a business that provides affordable, healthy food to the neighborhood. But I could never compete with the low prices of McDonald’s, local soul food joints (delicious but deadly) and Chinese restaurants.
What I’m circling is that I don’t know have a solution. My libertarian ethics prevent me from endorsing such a restrictive policy, but in cases like the South Bronx, SOMEBODY needs to tell these people what to do. Not the government… but somebody. Perhaps I’m not a creative enough businessperson to sell my community what I think it needs in the paternal-but-capitalist manner of the great business machines that turned McDonald’s into an American way of life.
Maybe fast food culture in poor neighborhoods is an example of market failure — there’s no adequate demand for healthier options, but there’s absolutely a need.
Many of you won’t understand how a libertarian could entertain such thoughts, but you don’t take the subway everyday with parades of desperately poor, overweight children being fed handfuls freedom fries.
“… desperately poor, overweight children…”
Wow.
anon,
Cute, but hardly relevant.
This doesn’t make any sense. You can easily get healthy food at just about any fast-food restaurant now. McDonald’s has a wide array of healthy salads, chicken sandwiches, etc. People don’t buy it because they don’t want it. Nothing you do is going to change that, short of strapping them down and force-feeding them.
Also, the explanation is not expense. No one is going to starve if you take away fast-food joints. Does it look like people are starving? If poor people shopped at grocery stores and bought cheap vegetables, etc., they could eat very well at a lower cost.
It’s simply a matter of preferences. Perhaps you could “nudge” people towards better choices, preventing some externalities (lost years of productive work? Hard on the eyes?). But this won’t do it. Why bother?
@ Allan: “Either we accept zoning or we don’t. If we accept zoning for one social good, we should accept it for all.”
Here, here! This is as ironic as it is depressing. First, we introduce zoning, forcibly segregate land uses, force people into cars, and add all sorts of associated undue burdens onto them — burdens that are most difficult for the poor to bare. Then people gain an AVERAGE of 10 pounds because they are driving everywhere, then we try to legislate more zoning to remove the ill-affects of the damage that zoning previously wrought.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25890997/
To be an annoying 12 year old for a minute: QQ more, noob. Local governments make a lot of retarded ass zoning decisions. This isn’t even an especially noteworthy level of retardation.
@liberty:
Yes, it is because they’re black, right?
Here’s a good’n
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1079584
“The results find no evidence of a causal link between restaurants and obesity, and the estimates are precise enough to rule out any meaningful effect.”
But don’t let a little correlation/causation fallacy or expert controversy get in the way of well-meaning politicians.
happyjuggler: “There is always someone who thinks that the reason that rich neighborhoods don’t have businesses that are “trashy” is due to zoning. Wrong. It is due to a combination of high rent and lack of local demand.”
David: “And finally, the lack of fast food restaurants in wealthy neighborhoods has little to do with “tolerance” and much to do with preferences. Few people would rather eat McDonald’s than say a nicer chain such a Ruth’s Chris.”
Not sure how you guys define “rich neighborhoods” and “wealthy neighborhoods”. Since this is a post about fast food restaurants, I assume that’s what you mean by “trashy” businesses, happyjuggler.
Highland Park and University Park – the wealthy Park Cities where Dallas blue bloods reside – are surrounded on four corners by McDonalds fast food restaurants. The McDonald’s on Lovers Lane near the Dallas North Tollway serves not just University Park, but also the very wealthy north Dallas suburbs of Preston Hollow, Devonshire, and Greenway Parks. These are the richest Dallas neighborhoods, and the folks there just love their Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. A Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, or Escalade at the drive-thru window is very common at this particular McDonald’s. I am confident that nearly all of these folks can eat at Ruth’s Chris as often as they wish. But they don’t.
Oops. That should have been:
It seems to me that this zoning is a matter of limiting something low status people like in the HOPE that something the people in charge prefer will move in. If it simply makes the low status people’s lives worse, the people in charge meant well, so they shouldn’t be blamed.
JSK,
Huh?
I personally don’t see how opening a fast food restaurant is going to make the local population fat.
People can choose to eat there or not.
Somehow you have tried to turn that into me saying that being black causes one to be obese. I’m not sure how you got there, but given that I know a lot of black skinny people, and I have heard of no science linking skin color to obesity, I do not think that this is the cause either.
I pointed to the post by Hungry Elk above, which also did not indicate skin color as a cause. In fact, it indicated the welfare state as the cause. Given the huge number of obese white people on welfare, this also seems possible. Again, correlation versus causation – but I do think its a more likely culprit than skin color.
It seems to me that this zoning is a matter of limiting something low status people like in the HOPE that something the people in charge prefer will move in. If it simply makes the low status people’s lives worse, the people in charge meant well, so they shouldn’t be blamed.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
– C. S. Lewis
It was a response to the idea that people in poorer areas have no choice but to eat McDonald’s.
Ummm, it’s the title of the piece. I know what you are referring to. I read it. But I guess you’d have to explain the title by saying the editors called it that. Of course he/they’d call it “Food Apartheid” to get the most readers.
‘Food Apartheid’ is the the slogan coined by supporters of the moratorium to refer to the current state of affairs. So it is the topic under discussion in the article. William Saleten did not coin the phrase or call the moratorium ‘food apartheid’, as I’ve seen numerous readers assert.
Actually, noone said they were making it illegal.
The quote I was responding to said the state had no right to say what one puts in their mouth. That is not the case here. This is more paternalism, a la Nudge, where people are steered into better behavior by manipulating the ordinal convenience of behavioral options. Or at least that’s the intent.
Here’s a good’n
Thanks, I couldn’t re-find that one! It appears the evidence here, even when using similar methods, is inconsistent. FWIW, I think weight differences are almost entirely genetic, and that rising obesity has mostly been the result of disease and not food; but I just do not share the libertarian viewpoint that government interventions and regulations are inherently unethical. The international trans-fat bans, for instance, look like a public health success.
Steve Sailer as always has an interesting take: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/08/temporary-ban-on-new-fast-food.html
re: Hungry Elk, that was an excellent response.
re: anon — Irrelevant:
1. Manhattan (now Brooklyn too!) — Brooklyn sucks. And who doesn’t love Manhattan?
2. Gentrification — I’m not trying to flip property, I’m a renter whose friend owns quality homes in the Bronx. I’d be foolish to pay 60% of my yearly income to rent in Manhattan. The market wills it.
3. Knowing what’s best for poor people — I admitted in my post that I don’t have any grand solutions, but a poor diet is a problem for anyone, not just poor people. So in this case, I know what’s best, period.
4. Being an expert on your culture — I’m no expert on anyone’s culture, but I’m very good at seeing what’s in front of me, like a fat person, or an epidemic, or a combination of the two.
5. Hating corporations — I love corporations. They make so much that enhances my lifestyle, they’ve paid for my education and my health insurance. On the other hand, I do think shrewdly coercive PR tactics have a paternalistic vain, and not everyone can see through them so easily as we here see through government regulation.
6. Being offended — Who’s offended?
@everybody who wants us to cook: time = money. that is really what mcdonald’s is selling. i watch my chinese roommates spending 2 or 3 hours a day over a pot while i can get my whopper in 30 seconds, freeing me up to do socially noble things like read this blog and educate you all
Hopefully anonymous: “One gets more freedoms as one demonstrates that one can handle them.”
And exactly who gets to decide that a human being has demonstrated that he or she can handle more freedom? You sound like someone writing a book on training a pet. That’s about as scary a sentence as I can remember reading.
Hopefully anonymous: “How to set those freedoms and barriers would be an empirical question. But I query the utility of making it as convenient as possible for low income people to have food that’s really, really bad for them.”
Who the hell are you to decide what’s good or bad for another human being? Surely this comment of yours is a joke, right?
I lost 40 pounds on a (carefull) Subway and Taco Bell diet.
Let’s also keep in mind minimum wage laws in making cheap full-service restaurants rare.
There are worse things than fast food
So true. That was one of the reasons McDonald’s and other fast-food franchises became so successful in the first place. The previous alternatives were local operations which often featured poor quality food, bad service, and dangerous sanitation. McDonald’s was built on standards and consistency. Their food is boring and unspectacular, but also unlikely to poison you. A “greasy spoon joint” was not always a term of endearment.
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