When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans there was a brief moment of shocked compassion before racial anxieties flooded the Internet. Victims of the disaster were quickly recast as looters, criminals, and layabouts. They were government “dependents” seeking even more entitlements now that they were bona fide survivors. Some of these hideous opinions drew on the physical “evidence” of the bad character of hurricane survivors: their size. The mostly black bodies crowding the Superdome, getting on rafts, and being carried away by helicopters, were too large for online critics. Obesity, while common in the U.S. and over-represented in the South, was conflated with blackness. Black bodies fleeing New Orleans were not only linked to historic stereotypes of menace and criminality but also slothfulness, helplessness, and a tropical torpidity unwelcome in hard-working America.



Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food With Government Help by Chin Jou University of Chicago Press, 248 pp., $25.00

African Americans are more likely to be obese in the United States than their white counterparts. The same is true for Hispanics. For some conservatives, that may be an indictment. For the rest of us, it is a public health problem. The rise in obesity in the U.S. is an epidemic and much of the root causes lie in poverty, a condition more prevalent in communities of color. In many U.S. cities, bodegas serve dinner in the form of chips and soda to low-income people living nearby who have no access to neighborhood supermarkets. For those without much money or options, fast food can be a blessing: a full meal that is quick and affordable in a safe and predictable setting. Yet, these very meals are one of the country’s biggest public health menaces. Filled with fat and sugar, fast food is contributing greatly to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Supersizing Urban America, a new book by the historian of public health, Chin Jou, shows that fast food did not just find its way to low-income urban areas: It was brought there by the federal government. In the wake of the 1968 riots, Nixon’s law-and-order presidency began programs that doled out federal funds to fast food franchises. The administration asserted that black-owned businesses serving fast food would help to cure urban unrest by promoting an entrepreneurial spirit in poor communities. The federal subsidization of McDonald’s and other chains to enter urban markets previously considered too poor or dangerous was meant to promote “black capitalism.” It did make a select group of black entrepreneurs wealthy, but it was mostly a boon to fast food giants searching for new market demographics.

Like “ethnic” advertising in the alcohol and cigarette industries, fast food companies sold a dream of middle class affluence to communities of color that were nonetheless still excluded from the housing and education that would make those aspirations a reality. Jou’s book shows conclusively that obesity and diet in America have little to do with personal responsibility, and everything to do with public policy.

Large bodies used to be a sign of health and vigor. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty targeted malnutrition and used the emaciated bodies of unemployed Appalachians to illustrate the shame of America’s wealth gap. It was Johnson who in 1964 began the Equal Opportunity Loan program that helped bring fast food to low-income areas. The agenda gained traction after violent unrest broke out in Los Angeles, Newark, and a dozen more cities in the mid-1960s. In the aftermath, Johnson’s administration called for a “Marshall Plan” to revitalize the ghetto. In communities where riots had occurred, only 25 percent of businesses were black owned and most were small. Providing loans to restaurants promoted the wholesome mission of the program, but fast food was also industrialized food. It replaced the soda fountains and greasy spoon neighborhood restaurants of the previous era with streamlined burger assembly lines answering to corporate shareholders.