YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU’RE going to get when two clueless, hopelessly-behind-the-times organizations put their heads together on an issue. Ladies and gen-tlemen, allow me to present the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles City Council. The Times, well known for shedding advertisers, circulation and relevancy as the newspaper industry withers away against the headwinds of the digital age, loves nothing more than spinning trumped-up data and isolated anecdotes into something resembling a story. And there’s no better place for them to go for material than the City Council, a group subsisting on attention-getting ideas with no connection to reality or their official job description.
There’s no bigger buzzphrase right now than “obesity epidemic.” And if there’s one thing organizations with a charter for social betterment do in times of trial, it’s to sling accusations at corporations and the general institution of capitalism. So it’s no surprise that the City Council is considering a two-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South L.A. as a way to halt the obesity crisis. And it’s no great shock to see the L.A. Times plaster the story on the front page, backing up the baseless assertions of reactionaries like Councilwoman Jan Perry with blustery reams of data that do nothing more than point out the painfully obvious.
Sherlock Holmes may be dead in name, but his uncanny investigative and interrogative spirit undoubtedly lives in hard-hitting reporting like this from Monday’s article: “A Times analysis of the city’s roughly 8,200 restaurants found that South Los Angeles has the highest concentration of fast-food eateries. Per capita, the area has fewer eating establishments of any kind than the Westside, downtown or Hollywood … But a much higher percentage of those are fast-food chains.”
Lord have mercy. Would you have ever guessed that the poor parts of town had more fast food joints than the affluent spots? What will they tell us next, that we can find more pawn shops, check cashing station and massage parlors there too? I’m totally floored.
And the L.A. Times doesn’t just hit us with the hard data. They tug at the heartstrings as well. Take one of the individual comments in the story that we can only assume are representative of all 700,000 people in South L.A.
“By the time I go home, it’s already too late to cook food,” said Catalina Ayala, 23, who works at LAX.
Ayala “lives three blocks from a McDonalds and a slew of other fast-food restaurants, and eats fast food about four times a week.” It seems to me that Ayala has-n’t discovered a key tenet of the modern world: It is, in fact, hard for anyone, of any income bracket, to work and maintain a normal home life... but many people do, in fact, work for hours each day and actually manage to cook themselves a meal that wasn’t processed, freeze-dried and fried. Poor people don’t have a moratorium on time-management difficulties and exhaustion.
The real airball in this whole situation is a fundamental misunderstanding of how business — in the true sense of supply-and-demand — works. Those on the reactionary left who are better at tearing down than being insightful and innovative, see capitalism as a push-only phenomenon, where evil corporations foist their unscrupulous wares on an unsuspecting and defenseless public. It’s actually a very dim view of human nature, as if we don’t have individual will or personal control over the choices we make.
But if there’s one thing defeatists like this have right, it’s the fact that corporations like to make money. They do. And they don’t make outlays and investments in places that don’t show any demand or promise for profit. And South L.A. shows incredible promise for profit when it comes to fast food because the residents really like it. They like it to the extent that they have the highest concentration of fast food restaurants in the county. In business, you give the customer what they want, it’s not the other way around. And this is a simple fact that The Times and City Council gloss over: People in this part of the city want a lot of fast food and the restaurants have obliged them.
There’s no doubt that our country has a problem with obesity and it’s certainly true that poor people have fewer choices when it comes to eating healthy, but we’re doing them a disservice when we attribute their behavior to anything other than their own selections and desires.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 13, 2007. Read the original PDF.