I wrote a few months back about how vaccines do not, in fact, cause autism. It got quite a few comments, which was a nice ego boost.
Well, I read online today an article from Michael Shermer who, in addition to bashing nicely on wheatgrass, has some things to say about the vaccine issue. Have a look!
Slate.com has an entertaining little opinion piece today all about a move by the Los Angeles city council to prohibit construction of new fast food restaurants in a particularly impoverished part of the city. The idea here is to create an area where higher-end restaurants or grocery stores will move in, thus giving people healthier choices for places to eat.
This is a bad idea. It’s paternalistic and worse, it won’t even work. Permit me to tell you a story from my own personal experience with this very issue.
I used to live in Palm Springs, CA. It’s a wonderful town to live in, provided you have money. I didn’t. But despite that, I lived in a nice area in what passes for downtown Palm Springs. Within easy walking distances of places like Palm Canyon Drive and such. It was a pretty nice area!
But the food choices I had were quite limited. I could either go to fast food places, or I could go to places like California Pizza Kitchen (where I worked for nearly a year, so I did eat there fairly often). But the higher-end restaurants were a little pricey for me, so when I ate out it was usually at Burger King.
The other choices I had for food basically were either Rite-Aid or Circle-K (again, I worked there for quite a while, but I didn’t usually get food there. No employee discount, and too expensive).
See, the nearest grocery store was a Ralph’s, and they were over a mile away. I didn’t, and still don’t, have a car. Most of the time there I didn’t even have a bike. The bus system in Palm Springs is a joke. I couldn’t afford cabs. This meant that I was having to walk back and forth for my groceries. When it was only a mile this wasn’t too bad, but it was far from great, especially during the summer (hottest day I ever saw there? 119. It’s one of the few places in the USA that has a decent-sized population and is routinely hotter than Phoenix).
The problem was that for several months while I lived there that store was closed for remodeling. This meant I had to schlep down to the Safeway about two miles from my apartment.
So imagine if you will, having to walk two miles to the grocery store, then walk back home, and be carrying a week worth of groceries. Now do this when it’s over 100 degrees.
So I have some empathy for the residents of this part of Los Angeles. I know what it’s like to be in a situation where your only easy choice is fast-food or food from a drug store/convenience store.
That said, though, I think the LA city council is hugely misguided here. What the residents of that area need is better food choices, true, but stopping new fast-food joints from being built will not solve the problem. It just means the ones already there will get richer. More high-end restaurants aren’t going to move into an area like that, because they know the local economy won’t support them. Grocery stores are something of a different matter, but not by much. If some place like Wal-Mart was going to move in and open a Super Center, they would’ve already done it.
I think what’s needed here is for the LA city council to, instead of banning new fast-food places, start offering some tax breaks and economic incentives for chains like Ralphs, Albertson’s, Safeway, etc, to come in and open grocery stores in that area. That will give people some real choices on food. It’s also a lot less paternalistic than telling adults, “You’re not responsible enough to decide what you should eat, so we’re going to force you to eat the way we want you to”.
Plus for the residents, it would be much better. Being on the lowest economic tier for most of my adult life, I can tell you affordable food is a major issue. Having a major grocery store within easy walking/biking distance is a must. Eating out or buying food at smaller drug/c-stores is very expensive. Not only is fresh food healthier, it’s also a lot cheaper.
I appreciate, at least to an extent, the motives of the LA city council, but their idea here is just stupid and paternalistic. It’s not going to solve any of the underlying problems; all it is, is something to make people feel better about themselves. Plus the lack of new fast-food places means less jobs in an area that could probably use more.
No matter how you slice it, this is a very bad idea.
