The Problem with proximity

It ain’t rocket science, really. The closer you are to your food source, the more likely it’s gonna get you. 

A clutch of bona fide researchers confirmed same, recently, with a study that explored the relationship between where a person lives and her physical condition. According to scientists at the University of Buffalo, the greater the number of restaurants near a woman’s home, the higher her body mass index is gonna be.

The study, which was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, looked at 172 women in Erie County, N.Y., who lived in urban, suburban and exurban areas. 

There’s much to be learned from research such as this for city planners who, say angry responders to such news, would do neighbourhood women a favour by being more judicious in their distribution of eateries.

Such a view absolves, somewhat, individuals of personal responsibility for their physical state, a controversial stand in this era of overly litigious fast food consumers, furious with the results of their frequenting a particular commercial establishment. But Toronto Food Strategy’s Cultivating Food Connections, a report exploring city dwellers’ access to healthy food closer to home, unapologetically calls the subject a municipal issue and insists its attendance should be among the mandates of every city department.

We’re at the point, says FoodShare Toronto’s executive director Debbie Field, “where planners should be citing healthy grocery stores just as they do schools when talking about development.”