Starting Thursday, Americans in five states who get government help paying for groceries will see new restrictions on soda, candy and other foods they can buy with those benefits.
Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah and West Virginia are the first of at least 18 states to enact waivers prohibiting the purchase of certain foods through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
It’s part of a push by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to urge states to strip foods regarded as unhealthy from the $100 billion federal program – long known as food stamps – that serves 42 million Americans.
“We cannot continue a system that forces taxpayers to fund programs that make people sick and then pay a second time to treat the illnesses those very programs help create,” Kennedy said in a statement in December.
The whole point of foodstamps is to make sure that you have the basics and can eat. When i see people blowing it on nothing but soda and candy it’s like why do you even have them.
Foodstamps are for food, use your own money on the junk instead of the other way around seems simple enough to me. I say that as someone who grew up multiple times homeless family living in the car and had foodstamps most of the time. Spending it on non essentials is stupid
Agreed entirely. Ask someone opposed to these policies (restrictions like this are the standard in almost every other socialist country BTW) what the “N” in SNAP means.
If you consider SNAP/Food Stamps/Nutritional support as a form of social investment, meaning that we all turn out ahead in the long run when people aren’t starving, how can you even think that candy, ultra-processed junk foods, soda, etc. is appropriate? Things that have no nutritional value whatsoever and are unanimously condemned by medical experts for having a net-negative impact on a person’s health? There is nothing to be gained whatsoever in consuming these types of things, neither individually nor as a culture.
The people on SNAP programs make up some of the country’s most disadvantaged and under educated. The junk food mega corporations have lobbied for decades to keep their poison SNAP-eligible for no reason other than profiteering and exploitation. There is zero gain.
SCAP next?
SOGAP after that?
Hell, why don’t we skip the wait and just legislate SBTTHAP (Supplemental Bullet to the Head Assistance Program) today.
You guys are REALLY going all in on ignoring the “and other foods” part. Since they’re not all listed in the article, who’s to say that the kakistocratic governments of the five states didn’t also ban nutritionally valid foods that they disapprove of for conspiracy theory and/or policy reasons?
Besides, there’s many so-called food deserts in those states: areas where fresh fruit and vegetables are scarce if not completely unavailable. Banning everything else effectively amounts to starving the people forced bt poverty to live in any of those areas.
This isn’t about helping poor people eat healthier. It’s about controlling what they can and cannot buy while paying less money to keep them alive.
What does the “N” in SNAP stand for?
Nutrition. I already adressed that.
You have to make up hypothetical scenarios to be upset about then. “What if they do this other thing!?!?” Then I’ll be upset about it. But the conversation between me and the other guy was about ultra-processed, nutritionally-irrelevant, health-adverse snacks (I don’t even call them food) from being excluded from SNAP benefits.
Yes or no, do you think they should be included?
There’s nothing hypothetical about food deserts. They DO exist and the people living there ARE disproportionately on SNAP and/or similar programs and unable to move away due to poverty
Or pretend that it isn’t real, apparently 🙄
Which is pretty myopic considering that there’s no proof that those are the only ones banned.
Given that they’re the least bad option available to some people, making the alternative to not eat at all, yes.
While healthy food is better than unhealthy food, unhealthy food is better than no food at all.
My hypothetical comment was about your saying “who’s to say that the kakistocratic governments of the five states didn’t also ban nutritionally valid foods that they disapprove of for conspiracy theory and/or policy reasons?”
Food deserts exist, of course they do, but the garbage I’m in favor of exempting from SNAP isn’t a replacement for food, either. If you told me you were in the desert and dying of dehydration, me bringing you a Pilot Precise V5 RT Rolling Ball pen wouldn’t quench your thirst, would it?
Semantics. Maybe not the only things banned, but banned nonetheless. That’s worth celebrating.
Show me ONE single real location where the ONLY option is between a pack of Hostess cakes and death. Just one. The human body cannot survive indefinitely on Fudge Rounds and Dr. Pepper, these people are getting nutrition from somewhere. Identify it, isolate it, encourage it, and remove addicting, big-money distractions.
Moreso, the way to combat food deserts is to stop encouraging them by telling junk snack dealers they can make infinite money selling Twinkies to the government on repeat. Even better, redistribute SNAP’s Twinkie fund to subsidize grocers in the food deserts.