Los Angeles Fast Food Moratorium

From Reuters: LA City Council passes a 1-year moratorium on fast food in several poor neighborhoods following a study that childhood obesity rates were 30% in South Los Angeles, West Adams, Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park compared to 21% in the rest of the city.

Although no existing restaurants are being closed down because of this law, and no provisions to promote the availability of low-cost healthy foods in these areas, this will make for a good case study of an interesting policy option. I'm interested to learn how the impacts of this will be evaluated.

We stink at estimating the caloric content of food...

...so why not require caloric content be labeled on restaurant menus, asks a pair from RWJ.

Opponents to menu labels argue that the info is already provided on websites and pamphlets (but how much would that influence consumer choices?), that the information would not be intelligible/useful to the average consumer (but couldn't it be useful with a little education?), and above all costly to the restaurants--not so much for the nutritional analysis which they already do, but for decreased sales. But that's the whole idea. We need to eat less.

Anyway, this is just an editorial with no new data, but they do cite prior studies including one indicating that providing point-of-purchase calorie info for items for which consumers tend to underestimate caloric content reduces the likelihood of purchasing the item from 37% to 24%.