A new weapon in the battle against obesity was rolled out last month when the Los Angeles City Council decided to stop new fast food joints from opening in some of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods.

Even in a country where a third of the schoolchildren are overweight, the yearlong moratorium raises questions about when eating one style of food stops being a personal choice and becomes a public health concern.

The struggle against poor diets has included booting soda from schools, banning trans fat and, more recently, sending New Yorkers into dietary sticker shock with a law that requires calorie counts be posted on menus, right next to the prices. But this appears to be the first time a Government has prohibited a specific style of restaurant for health, rather than aesthetic, reasons.

Jonathan Gold, the LA Weekly food critic, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year, said he understands the spirit of the freeze, which is an urban planning measure meant to keep the neighbourhood from being swallowed up by drive-though fast food restaurants.

But he worries that the law could keep out places of more culinary interest. South Los Angeles has the best barbecue in the city, he said, and it has a growing number of cooks from Mexico and Central America.

The councilwoman behind the moratorium, Jan Perry, says its intent is not to crush food choices. Making healthy decisions about food is difficult when people have small incomes, the grocery store is five miles away and a $1 cheeseburger is right around the corner, she and supporters of the ban say.

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