Junk food proliferates around schools
In 2016, Côte‑des‑Neiges‑NDG borough passed a bylaw banning fast food joints near schools. They had to defend the law all the way to the Supreme Court. But now there’s fast food everywhere and kids have few other options.
If they can keep SQDC stores at a distance from schools, why is it so difficult to do the same for fast food?
jeather 11:27 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
They seem to define fast food in a specific way, so small places can get past it, and the big ones were already there. But let’s be realistic here about what kind of restaurants teens at lunch will preferentially go to — it’s not expensive places that take a while to serve fresh veggies.
Blork 11:35 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
The comparison with SQDC is erroneous because SQDC is not competing with other retailers selling the same thing (which is the case with restaurants).
The problem is defining “fast food.” According to the article, the current definition has more to do with service levels and disposable packaging than the food itself. You can go to a high-end sit-down restaurant and get a burger and fries and it would not be classified as fast food, or you can go to Boustan and get a vegetarian meal consisting of salads and roasted vegetables and that WOULD be considered “fast food.”
The regulation is flawed right from the start because it’s based on the idea that food being “fast” and “take-out” necessarily makes it “fast food” and therefore “junk.” Totally erroneous and very difficult to regulate.
Why is a McDo burger “junk” but a Toqué burger “not junk?”
Why are fries from Wendy’s “junk” but fries from Milos “not junk?”
Why is a sandwich from Subway “junk” but a sandwich from a bespoke joint in Mile-End “not junk?”
Why is chicken burger from Harvey’s “junk” but a chicken burger from a halal kabob joint “not junk?”
The only way to ban fast food restaurants from school zones is to ban ALL restaurants from school zones, and I don’t think anyone wants that.
Ephraim 12:09 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
The only way to actually define a restaurant in such a way would be to judge the percentage of food that is transformed in-house. And then you run into definitions of what constitutes transformed. For example, are the onions transformed if you soak dehydrated onions to use them? Is a sliced tomato a transformation? If you make a sauce using ketchup, is that a transformed sauce? Is it different if it’s a barbecue sauce for a meatloaf versus a burger sauce with mayo?
MarcG 12:31 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
Other countries have grading systems they use to inform people of the nutritional value of packaged foods (e.g. Nutri-Score in France) – not sure if they’ve found a way to integrate it into restaurants, though.
Daniel 13:16 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
Blork, the answer that’s emerging to your multiple (rhetorical) questions is “highly processed food” vs. not. So in this case, the booklong ingredient list for McDo fries vs. a potato dropped in oil, or the bread simulacrum served at Subway vs. the bread at the fancy pants joint
There’s not a great way to legislate this, but just pointing out that there are answers to these questions and a growing body of research on ultraprocessed foods.
Ephraim 14:05 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
@MarcG – If only we could get those labels here.
@Daniel – Do you know how FEW restaurants actually make their fries anymore? And almost all of them are coated with Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate or Sodium Phosphate and then sprayed down with dextrose, so they brown better. The bread is usually brought in from Bridor, so baked there, but not really produced there and the desserts are from a central dessert shop, like GFS. Heck, Costco makes cakes for some companies on contract. Walk by Schwartz’s and the window has smoked Turkey that is commercial. Unless a deli is making it’s own pickles, you won’t find half sours around, because very few of the manufacturers make them. There is so much transformed foods are even slow serve restaurants today.
Nicholas 14:14 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
Daniel, I used to go to the Ville St Pierre Lafleur as a kid on bike rides along the canal, and you could watch them use the potato cutting machine to make raw fries out of whole (peeled) potatoes, then dump those in the deep fryer. I can’t say for sure there isn’t high/ultra processing, but those fries were greasy as hell, and I’m sure very bad for me, even if “natural”. I don’t think allowing that but banning McDo is going to make too many people happy.
And even if you could write a law that clearly delineated good from bad food, what about food in grocery stores (and deps)? In high school my friends and I would often buy a bag of chips and a 2 L soft drink after school and consume it on the way home on the bus (all in NDG). This was obviously not good for us, but I gather it would be fine under this law?
I’m not saying we can’t make bad things harder if we don’t completely make every bad thing very hard. But when you write a law you have to do it in a way that is not very easily circumvented. This does not seem like an easy topic.
Nicholas 14:20 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
Kate, it’s easy to keep the SQDC away from schools because the government chooses where to put them. They’re not a bad actor (in theory), and they can follow their own laws, and if they don’t want to they could just change the laws. Restaurants, being private, want to get around the laws, and unless you ban all restaurants near schools (which you can do easily with zoning), you have to define which restaurants are “good” and “bad”, which is hard, as noted above, and they will all try to get around the laws.
jeather 14:37 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
What sounds like it might help is improving the cafeterias so they are not actively unpleasant to eat in, and making the food tasty if food is served. But that would cost money, and these are schools in low income areas so I bet there are more children of immigrants, and that would never fly.
Blork 14:39 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
Echoing what Nicolas said. While it’s easy to determine the 19 ingredients in McDo fries, how easy is it to determine every ingredient in every one-off or independent restaurant that pops up? Especially when small/local restaurants change their offerings and their recipes on a regular basis.
As Nicholas points out, the difficultly is in grading restaurants as “good” vs. “bad” (or wholesome vs. junk) in any sort of real-world environment, short of setting up a police state in the food service world where every restaurant has a FOOD COP there 24/7 checking on how all the dishes are made.
Surely there are better ways. For example, maybe bring back food services as part of the school system, where you can control what is offered, and (most importantly) do it right so the food is healthy and attractive — and affordable. It won’t stop some kids from going for junk food occasionally, but it would certainly put a big dent in it while maybe even teaching kids that good food can actually be good.
MarcG 15:33 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
@Ephraim: Looks like Canada is implementing its own front-of-package nutrition symbol system.
Ephraim 15:49 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
@MarcG – A far cry from Nutri-Score, which is what I think we need to implement…. and frankly, even if government asked companies to voluntarily do it, it would be a big move forward, because people looking for healthier choices will pick those meals that are scored and skip those who aren’t.
Kate 18:26 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
Blork, I had to go look at the online menu. A Toqué burger?!
Blork 19:47 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
Kate, Toqué has (had?) a burger kiosk at Timeout Market called Burger T!
jeather 20:22 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
The one time I went there, I thought it was good but overpriced.
Ian 22:25 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
As I recently saw on the socials:
Late Gen X – too old to be a TikTok star, too young to own property, just old enough to have seen sandwiches go from $5 to $30.
Joey 10:49 on 2024-08-06 Permalink
I remember the glorious day when they opened up a McDonald’s at the halfway point between my high school and my house. Go figure, I didn’t need a committee of experts to analyze the ingredients to understand that this junk was being marketed specifically to me – and I was all in. I didn’t know I could use a quick meal before dinner from time to time… somehow the opening of that fast food chain restaurant brought everything into new relief. All this to say, as a parent, I 100% understand how and why public health officials would want to to keep that shit away from kids – just don’t even get started. As a former teenager, I’d be really sad if these kinds of fairly harmless vices were totally inaccessible to kids.
Anyway, the SQDC thing is a red herring for a couple of reasons – as already stated, the province has a monopoly on retail cannabis sales so it can do whatever it wants. Second, you can’t even walk in to an SQDC without showing ID to a security guard. Yes, some SQDC outlets attract a bit of an ‘undesirable’ crowd of loiterers and panhandlers, but so do grocery stores.
Kate 11:10 on 2024-08-06 Permalink
There’s often a guy outside the Jarry SQDC playing Bob Marley on a boombox. Not sure what he gets out of doing it, although it seems appropriate.
Ian, that is so sadly true.