This doesn't actually solve anything, there will still be food deserts where the only store in town is a dollar store.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
25 points (96.3% liked)
United States | News & Politics
2838 readers
721 users here now
Welcome to [email protected], where you can share and converse about the different things happening all over/about the United States.
If you’re interested in participating, please subscribe.
Rules
Be respectful and civil. No racism/bigotry/hateful speech.
Post anything related to the United States.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's as easy as taking candy from children... No but really, as someone on SNAP, candy is a small and rare joy in life.
Boo to high fructose!
I hate high fructose too but doing this is just unnecessarily shitting on the poor.
How?
Because if it's bad, it's bad for everybody. Buying food using SNAP benefits doesn't magically transform it into something unhealthy. Given that's the case, we should just ban soda and candy for everybody. But, that's not the proposal. Presumably, people with more money have the self-control to make informed, rational decisions about whether to buy it? Not like those poors, who can't be trusted not to blow all of their limited funds on junk food. (<-- There it is. There's the shitting on the poor part.)
There seems to be some correlation between cavities and children in low income homes. There is likely a number of factors to this, but junk food I believe seems to be one of them.
https://www.cdc.gov/oral-health/php/2024-oral-health-surveillance-report/selected-findings.html
However, maybe more to your point, the issue is also accessibility to healthy foods at reasonable prices. Additionally, likely parent education about how fucking awful soda and candy is.
If that's the issue, banning soda and candy for everybody would also improve things for poor kids.
I mean, I wouldn't disagree.
Not like those poors, who can't be trusted not to blow all of their limited funds on junk food. (<-- There it is. There's the shitting on the poor part.)
This dramatically undervalues the predatory practices of snack food companies, and redirects the blame. This is a problem solved by regulation, but the people that most need to be protected by those regulations are the poor, who are targeted for exploitation by the companies producing cheap, processed "foods."
RFK is a dangerous idiot, and his handful of seemingly okay policy ideas only exist to distract from the harm that the administration, he is part of, is doing. This is one of those policies. It will never be anything more than a headline in any meaningful way.
This isn't a new effort that Brainworm Guy came up with. It's been part of Republican ideology, and bogus stories about people "buying steak and lobster and eating better than me with my tax money" have been circulating among their base for several decades. (Think back to Ronald Reagan talking about "welfare queens" driving around in Cadillacs.) The hidden agenda is to saddle the SNAP program with so many bureaucratic costs, like policing whether people's choices are healthy enough, that they can point to it as an example of government waste, and cut it.
Plenty of non-poor people eat cheap, processed "foods," too. Target the real problem, protect everybody, instead of infantilizing poor people as too stupid to make their own decisions.
Soda is probably cheaper than water in USA. /S
Cheaper than bottled water, sure. Clean water comes out of everyone's tap, a limitless supply that costs pennies
In some places it even has ~~electrolytes~~ lead, what MAGA brains crave!
Isn't that the case to some extent already? At least I know the WIC program has certain allowed items for it, so kind of presuming SNAP has similar policies.
SNAP is way less restrictive than WIC. SNAP is pretty much no prepared food, etoh or cigarettes but whatever else is good.
Ah, been quite a while since I interacted with any of them personally, like when my middle kid was born ago so it's a bit fuzzy. I recall WIC was pretty specific lists like you get 2 milks and one cereal and one thing of eggs...
WIC (was) insanely specific when I worked grocery 20 years ago. I mean down to oz in the paper things, and the machine would get grumpy if the cereals were off that even by a little. And everything had to be scanned, then scan in the papers and hope it worked. Loved the ladies who made that the entire section with each paper on top of its respective foods. Easier.
Snap, even back then, was just a card and convered almost everything (no hot, no prepared, no alcohol, no smokes)
So there is at least one sane thought in his brain.
Nope. It's already the case in a lot of States and you can almost guarantee the changes will break the system.
Nope. I said "thought" and not "execution".