Reminder: Poor People Don’t Eat More Fast Food
“It also hasn’t really worked. Since the policy was enacted seven years ago, obesity jumped from 63 percent to 75 percent in the South Central L.A neighborhoods it targeted. Perhaps that’s because, as the L.A Times reported in 2015, the number of fast-food restaurants actually increased by 17 in the seven years since the policy was put into place. (Standalone fast-food restaurants might have been banned, but fast-food restaurants in strip malls were not.) That’s certainly an argument against this specific policy, but it’s not quite a reason to think a more draconian ban would have been more successful at reducing obesity rates. That’s because the assumption at the core of this genre of policy—that low-income households consume more fast food than others and that this is the cause of their obesity—is contradicted by a wealth of data.”