LA’s Mistargeted Ban

Reading the New York Times coverage of the attempted ban on new fast food restaurants in South LA I’m more convinced than ever that this is a pretty questionable idea. The Times says that this is “the first time a government has prohibited a specific style of restaurant for health, rather than aesthetic, reasons.” That, however, might well be that it doesn’t really make sense to ban a specific style of restaurant for health reasons. If you want to try to restrict the sale of unhealthy food, you should restrict the sale of unhealthy food.

Instead, their restriction is on restaurants that feature “a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders, and food served in disposable wrapping or containers.” That doesn’t make any reference to the nutritional content of the food. But you could serve something healthy from behind a counter in a disposable wrapper and you can sell something unhealthy at a table. It’s not, after all, the lack of table service that makes a Big Mac and super-sized fries bad for you. I think it’s good to see local government trying to take more interest in these kind of public health issues, but it has to be done in a smart way that’s reasonably tailored to the objective.