Fortunes of Calif.'s operators, diners, farmers affected by diet-conscious or do-nothing pols

Nation's Restaurant News,  Sept 24, 2007  by Richard Martin

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California, birthplace of French-dip sandwiches, hot-fudge sundaes, ranch dressing, McDonald's, and salmon-and-caviar pizzas, now wants to put folks on a diet.

But some weight-watching lawmakers in the state that also gave the world the fortune cookie seem to foresee a commercial future in which free-market principles no longer would drive crucial gears of California's economic engine.

As the state stood poised this month to become the first to enact a law requiring operators to include dietary data on their menus, at least one Los Angeles City Council member was promoting a ban on construction of fast-food restaurants in some largely African-American neighborhoods because of their higher rates of obesity.

Meanwhile, the failure of federal legislators to reform immigration laws was being blamed for thinning out the ranks of farmers who give California its status as producer of more than half the nation's fruits, nuts and vegetables--including all its almonds, artichokes, Brussels sprouts, figs, kiwifruit, nectarines, olives, pistachios and walnuts. Not to mention multibillion-dollar outputs of dairy goods, grapes, wine, lettuce and beef.

Indeed, while consumers were on the verge of becoming more nutritionally informed when dining at branches of chains with 15 or more California locations, and as some 700,000 Los Angeleans were being told that a selective and seemingly punitive restraint of trade would help them lose weight, like it or not, farmers in the Golden State were making a run for the border.

Heck, the growers must reason, Mexico is where most of their workers come from anyway--a notion bolstered by a U.S. Labor Department estimate that 53 percent of the nation's 2.5 million farm workers are illegal immigrants. What's more, the fleeing California farmers point out, there's no risk of a costly U.S. immigration raid on any of the tens of thousands of acres they have leased in such Mexican states as Guanajuato and Baja California.

Representatives of California's $32 billion agriculture industry say Congress' inability to update immigration laws and create new guest worker programs is driving increasing numbers of growers to move their operations south of the border. They say that enables them to hire field hands they cannot recruit in sufficient numbers back home and lets them avoid new threats of steep penalties for hiring infractions. No one is yet forecasting that an acceleration of the grower exodus could someday lead to a permanent con version of more California farmland into other uses. But such a scenario may be unsettling nonetheless. Imagine U.S. consumers--including the biggest consumer group, restaurateurs--becoming increasingly dependent on imported produce, especially if current suspicions about the safety of imports do not subside. What's more, there has been talk among several presidential candidates about scuttling the NAFTA treaty, which could presage some future shift in supply-side clout to foreign forces that could impose costly new tariffs on imported food.

It's also unsettling to think that lawmakers in the nation's second-largest city would turn their attention from things like freeway gridlock, air pollution and drive--by shootings to a proposed two-year moratorium on fast-food development in areas of South Los Angeles. Those districts are known to have a higher proportion of quick-service eateries than in other parts of the city, but fewer restaurants per capita overall.

However, my reading of socioeconomic research into causes of obesity suggests that the demographics of neighborhoods targeted by councilwoman Jan Perry's moratorium plan may explain the ducumented overweight issues of residents, regardless of their access to fast-food establishments.

Bang-for-buck shopping by lower-income consumers often translates to diets that are long on cheap but fattening starches and short on fresh produce. And price points and affordability, not exploitation, probably explain less-affluent diners' disproportionate support for fast-food restaurants. Those factors also suggest a likelihood that inexpensive burgers and fries often are preferred by such consumers over widely available menu options that may appear less filling and cost-effective, like fruit-and-yogurt snacks and entree salads.

To be fair to Perry's apparent rationale for regarding fast-food restaurants like poker parlors or strip clubs, the council-woman simultaneously wants to create financial incentives for more full-service restaurants to locate in South Los Angeles, even if those lures would just be timesaving reductions in municipal red tape during the permit process.

Ostensibly, those alternative kinds of restaurants would offer leaner, more health-oriented fare to round out South L.A. residents' diets. But here again Perry's rationale for social engineering collides with reality--such as the old findings by nutrition watchdogs that some popular dishes of full-service restaurants, like Kung Pao chicken and fettuccine Alfredo, may imperil consumers' health. Conversely, Perry's plan presumably would block the opening of new El Pollo Loco restaurants, whose signature nonfried chicken and many of its side dishes are considered paragons of healthfulness.