Friday Round-up: Joel Berg’s Fridge, South L.A. Bans (new) Fast Food, and Wal-Mart Joins Let’s Move

Never a dull moment in the world of food politics and food justice.

• Yesterday, first lady Michelle Obama announced that Wal-Mart (yes, Wal-Mart) will be joining her Let’s Move! campaign in a big way. Not only will the super size grocery chain reduce prices on fresh fruits and vegetables, it promises to reformulate its own line of processed foods (called Great Value) to reduce sodium and sugar content (by 25 and 10 percent, respectively), and remove all transfats as well. America’s biggest grocery also says it will open new outlets in food deserts, according to ObFo. A whopping 40 million people a week shop at Wal-Mart. I’ll save my editorializing for later, but for now I will say this: why couldn’t we orchestrate a program that would give tax credits to small, independent grocery stores to open up in food deserts?  Wal-Mart will argue that they’ll stimulate these economically depressed areas by offering jobs, but the company is famous for its lousy labor policies.

• One of my favorite columns anywhere is Edible Brooklyn‘s The Brooklyn Fridge, in which a writer peers into a prominent Brooklyn resident’s fridge and asks all sorts of prying, personal questions. In the current issue, Gabrielle Langholtz quizzes anti-hunger advocate Joel Berg about his eating habits (ironically, he’s too busy to cook much but he does shop at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket) and his food justice values (“My goal is to get everyone out of poverty, not to bring everyone else down to it.”) During the interview, Berg, who is the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, argues persuasively against making soda ineligible for food stamps, which Bloomberg has attempted to do. “We so distrust them [people who are on food stamps] that we micromanage every part of their lives. It’s humiliating. In New York you have to be fingerprinted to get food stamps. It sends the message to low-income people that they can’t be trusted to make their own decisions.” I still think food stamps should not cover soda (food stamp recipients are still free to buy soda, of course, just not with their EBT benefits)—just as they don’t cover other unhealthy products such as cigarettes and liquor. But Berg’s lengthy, provocative reply got me thinking.

• South L.A., known for its high rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, has banned any new fast food joints. This brazen policy is controversial, of course: some public health advocates wonder how much good it will do, since the area’s existing 1,000 fast-food restaurants will remain open. And naturally the California Restaurant Association is up in arms. (But why don’t they just encourage healthy mom-and-pop restaurants to open in South L.A.?)  My favorite quote in the Times’ article is this, by a senior economist at RAND (and co-author of a study that found a moratorium would likely not change the rate of obesity or diabetes in the area). “People talk about this area being a food desert, but it is more like a swamp—you are literally drowning in food, but none of it is really a good option.”