Targeting Low-Income Communities

Inner-city neighborhoods often lack supermarkets and access to fresh produce. Supermarkets have fled from America’s inner cities, seeking the higher profits they can get in the more affluent suburbs. For many city residents, it could be an hour’s bus ride to the nearest grocery store, making healthful eating extremely difficult. When there are grocery stores, they charge more than their suburban counterparts, and the food quality is often poor.[1]

Into this nutritional vacuum step transnational corporations, who have checkered our city streets with ubiquitous fast food restaurants. Combine that with little access to open, green space, and you start to see to see why inner cities have our nation’s highest rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.  

In one Los Angeles neighborhood, there are nine fast food restaurants per square mile. It’s become so bad that the City Council recently passed a moratorium on the opening of new fast food restaurants.[2] In Chicago, fast food restaurants have been purposefully built next to schools across the city, creating additional temptations for children to pop in for a snack after school, or maybe skip the cafeteria in favor of lunch at McDonald’s.[3]

As the economy worsens, fast food sales are going up. But the real cost of the “value meal” will come later, when the number of complications from chronic diseases like diabetes and coronary heart disease starts to skyrocket. Diabetes-induced blindness, amputations, heart attacks and debilitating strokes – all of these will occur at historic rates if we don’t change course.

1. Mark Winne, Closing the Food Gap (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008), 86-89.

2. “L.A. fast-food moratorium one step closer to reality,” Reuters, July 23, 2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSCOL36199520080723 (accessed February 5, 2009).

3. S. Bryn Austin, et al., “Clustering of Fast-Food Restaurants around Schools: A Novel Application of Spatial Statistics to the Study of Food Environments,” American Journal of Public Health, 95:9 (2005):1575-1581. http://www.ajph.org/cgi/reprint/95/9/1575?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=1&andorexacttitle=and&andorexacttitleabs=and&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&volume=95&firstpage=1575&resourcetype=HWCIT (accessed February 5, 2009).

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