The Bay Area is a cradle of environmentalism and a region with a rich trove of health and medical research and resources. In this blog, we’ll report on the deepening understanding of how the places we inhabit and the lifestyles we adopt contribute to our own health and the health of our communities.
As California has sought to reduce the amount of calories, fat, sugar and saturated fat sold in foods sold in cafeterias, food trucks have served as an alternative junk food supplier to students in Novato, as The Bay Citizen has reported.
While the new ordinance does not directly address the issue of nutrition and healthy eating, it does take care to note the "distraction" the trucks provide to children:
Mobile food vending vehicles often proliferate around public and private school sites within the City, which provide both a distraction to school children and an immediate threat to their health and safety by placing them in a vulnerable position in heavily trafficked areas during regular school hours.
The ordinance will regulate the time of day and the distance from schools the trucks may operate, limiting them to outside of these guidelines:
...1500 feet of the nearest property line of any public or private school between the hours of 7:30 am and 4:00 p.m. on regular school days;
Limitations were also placed on the number of food trucks that may operate in a given area, preventing trucks from parking close to each other:
...within two hundred feet of another mobile food vending vehicle which has already stopped to vend;
It also provided this handy definition of the word "food," for those of us left wondering:
“Food” means any good or merchandise that is cooked, made, manufactured, bottled, grown, preserved, or prepared for the purpose of being eaten or imbibed.
© The Bay Citizen, 2012
