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I have a good friend who works in a “food desert,” which is a community that lacks access to healthy food.  She interns at a mental health clinic in Boyle Heights.  At lunchtime, she faces a deluge of fast food options: Burger King, Little Caesar’s, Subway, Popeye’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Drug dealers and gang members loiter outside the only market in the area.  Given that her lunch break doesn’t afford her enough time to commute for lunch, she’s forced to choose from this surfeit of unhealthy food.  Fortunately for her, it’s only a lunchtime dilemma.  The residents of Boyle Heights are not so lucky.

Food deserts plague inner cities all across the United States.  These communities face a combination of poverty and crime that discourage healthy food retailers, such as supermarkets and farmer’s markets, from setting up shop.  People living in these areas are forced to rely on fast food restaurants and convenience stores.  A diet rich in double bacon cheese burgers, sugary extra large sodas and snack cakes is not conducive to healthy living.  Food deserts are rife with obesity and obesity related health problems, such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease and stroke.

Food deserts, however, are not just a problem for low income communities.  A 2007 study by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy revealed that California as a whole has more than four times as many fast-food restaurants and convenience stores as supermarkets and produce vendors.  High income communities don’t escape the deleterious effects of food deserts- all communities with an overabundance of unhealthy food options have similarly high obesity rates.

In fact, obesity plagues California.  A full 21% of Californians are obese, and another 35% are overweight.  In an era where skyrocketing health care costs are bankrupting our state government, it is incumbent upon us to fight obesity and the costly treatments that are required to treat obesity-related diseases.  It is also an issue of social justice: we all deserve access to healthy food, whether we live in South Los Angeles or Beverley Hills.

There are Los Angelenos who are already taking action.  Stay tuned for my next blog entry in which I’ll put the spotlight on the South Central Farmers and their controversial effort to make South Central Los Angeles’s food desert bloom.