Harold and Kumar avoid South LA for 365 Days

City officials are putting South Los Angeles on a diet.

City council voted unanimously Tuesday to place a moratorium on new fast food restaurants in an impoverished swath of the city with a proliferation of such eateries and above average rates of obesity.

The yearlong moratorium is intended to give the city time to attract restaurants that serve healthier food.

The action, which the mayor must still sign into law, is believed to be the first of its kind by a major U.S. city.

“Our communities have an extreme shortage of quality foods,” Coun. Bernard Parks said.

Representatives of fast-food chains said they support the goal of better diets but believe they are being unfairly targeted. They already offer healthier food items on their menus, they said.

“It’s not where you eat, it’s what you eat,” said Andrew Pudzer, president and chief executive of CKE Restaurants, parent company of Carl’s Jr. “We were willing to work with the city on that, but they obviously weren’t interested.”

The California Restaurant Association and its members will consider a legal challenge to the ordinance, spokesman Andrew Casana said.

Thirty per cent of adults in the South Los Angeles area are obese, compared to 19.1 per cent for the metropolitan area and 14.1 per cent for the affluent Westside, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

Research has shown that people will change eating habits when different foods are offered, but cost is a key factor in poor communities, said Kelly D. Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.

73% of South L.A. restaurants serve fast food

“Cheap, unhealthy food and lack of access to healthy food is a recipe for obesity,” Brownell said. “Diets improve when healthy food establishments enter these neighbourhoods.”

A report by the Community Health Councils found 73 per cent of South Los Angeles restaurants were fast-food establishments, compared to 42 per cent in West Los Angeles.

Coun. Jan Perry said the view that there are too many fast-food joints in the area surfaced repeatedly during the five community meetings she held over the past two years. Residents are tired of fast food, and many don’t have cars to drive to places with other choices, she said.

Los Angeles’ ban comes at a time when governments of all levels are increasingly viewing menus as a matter of public health. On Friday, California became the first state in the nation to bar trans fats from restaurant food. Trans fats lower levels of good cholesterol and increase bad cholesterol in the body.

The fast-food moratorium, which can be extended up to a year, only affects standalone restaurants, not eateries located in malls. It defines fast-food restaurants as those that do not offer table service and provide a limited menu of pre-prepared or quickly heated food in disposable wrapping.

The definition exempts “fast-food casual” restaurants such as El Pollo Loco, Subway and Pastagina, which do not have drive-through windows or heat lamps and prepare fresh food to order