At a Jack in the Box fast-food outlet in South Los Angeles one recent Sunday morning, Tatiana Burkhardt, an obese 21-year-old nursing assistant, lumbers toward a plate of bulletproof glass that protects employees from customers, and orders a Jumbo Jack burger, a large Natural-Cut Fries and a 32-oz. "medium" Sprite through the intercom. Retrieving her meal — all 1,150 calories of it, almost half from fat — via a slot in the glass, Burkhardt sits down and carefully picks a reddish substance from her Jumbo Jack. "I don't eat fast-food tomatoes," she says. Such are the culinary challenges in a neighbourhood long considered the most troubled in the United States — South L.A., a sprawling, dilapidated cityscape where, apart from the risks of getting robbed or shot, the perils can be dietary. The birthplace of the Bloods and Crips and home to the 1992 Rodney King riots is also a "food desert," a term adopted by social policy planners in the 1990s to describe the growing number of low-income areas with poor access to healthy, affordable food.

A controversial ordinance passed into law last week proposes to change that. The legislation, unanimously approved by L.A. city council, effectively bans fast-food chains from opening in South L.A. for a year, with the option of two six-month extensions. The moratorium, coupled with a package of incentives, hopes to draw more sit-down restaurants and grocery stores to the district.

For California to enforce the world's first fast-food ban is ironic. This, after all, is where drive-throughs were popularized in the 1950s. But it's not surprising given the state's status as a trendsetter in all matters edible — from Wolfgang Puck's smoked salmon pizza to dietary policing. In 2004, L.A.'s Unified School District became one of the first in the U.S. to ban soft drinks, candy and other high-fat snack foods from school vending machines. This month, the state became the first in the country to ban artificial trans fat in all restaurant food as of 2010, following the lead of many local governments, including New York City. Zoning of fast food in itself isn't new; in the past, though, it has been at the behest of affluent communities offended by the traffic and pollution, garish aesthetics or the threat the outlets presented to local businesses and property values. Concord, Mass., has banned drive-through and fast-food restaurants, as have the California resort towns Carmel-by-the-Sea and Calistoga. (The City of Toronto has similarly restricted drive-throughs in residential neighbourhoods.)

What makes the South L.A. ordinance groundbreaking is the fact it restricts fast food for public health reasons. (New York City councilman Joel Rivera proposed a similar ban in 2006 but it was shot down.) And this 83-sq.-km district that's home to 720,000, most black and Hispanic, 28 per cent of whom live below the poverty line, would appear to present the perfect test case: nowhere is the twinning of super-sized meals and super-sized people more overt. Nearly one out of two restaurants is a fast-food outlet. Amid fading murals celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and the vivid colours of its Latino storefronts, the rundown streetscape serves up a monotonous sequence of McDonald's, Burger Kings, Carl's Jrs. and Kentucky Fried Chickens. The poverty is palpable. Many mom-and-pop fast-food operations serving Southern cooking advertise they accept food stamps. South L.A. includes some high-income communities that can afford better, but "the pathology of lower income has dominated," says Faisal Roble, the L.A. city planner who drafted the ordinance.

A study released in the spring by L.A.'s Department of Public Health found 30 per cent of adults here are obese, compared to the national rate of 21 per cent. South L.A. also boasts the country's highest incidence of diabetes — 11.7 per cent compared to a countrywide average of 8.1 per cent. "We have a community that is probably the sickest in L.A. County," says Gwendolyn Flynn, policy director for the Community Health Councils, or CHC, a non-profit agency.

Buying fresh food is difficult. There's a scant 6.8 retail food outlets for every 100,000 residents, or one supermarket, local grocer or convenience store for every 6,000 people, according to a report prepared by the CHC in April. Adjacent neighbourhoods in West Los Angeles, meanwhile, boasted 26.6 retail food outlets for every 100,000 residents. Only five per cent of South L.A.'s food stores are full-service national or regional supermarket chains, versus one-third of food stores in West Los Angeles neighbourhoods. Burkhardt and her roommate, Kristen Martinez, a 22-year-old forklift operator, are among the 16 per cent of South L.A. residents who must travel 20 minutes or more to reach their preferred grocery store — the discount chain Food 4 Less — and must rely on a friend to drive them the 20-minute journey twice a month; by bus, it takes 45 minutes.

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