A reader writes:
The whole concept of food stamps is nannyism. The message they send is that the state can’t trust you to even feed yourself if they don’t make you spend the money on food – that if left to your own devices, you’d accidentally spend it all on laundry detergent and then starve the rest of the month, or spend it all on booze or crack or something.
Money is fungible. So if someone gets $300/mo in food stamps, guess what? The money they used to spend on food is now freed up. You haven’t changed their behavior one bit, and possibly even encouraged it since now they have this disposable income that they apparently can’t be trusted to spend wisely.
If you knock junk food off the buy list for food stamps, a lot of people will feel like they’re helping America’s poor. But you know what? They’ll just use the money freed up by the food stamps to buy the food they really want. The only practical effect of rules like this is to make getting in line behind food stamp users a long and painful process as they sort between the food stamp approved items and the cash items. It will have absolutely no effect on people’s eating habits at all, except maybe to free up the cash for even more crap.
I worked at a gas station for a while, and people were allowed to use food stamps on fountain drinks – as long as they hadn’t put a straw in the cup. If they had a straw in their hand or in the pocket, that was fine, but if they put the straw in the drink, we weren’t supposed to let them use food stamps. Ultimately all the rules about how they can spend food stamps are about that pointless.
Another writes:
Food stamp users get on average less than a $1 per meal per month. That’s $3-4 a day. That’s not a lot and not a huge boost in purchasing power. Most food stamp users who buy soda do so not necessarily because they are wasteful or uneducated or looking to work the system, but because soda is all they can really afford to buy on a paltry amount of benefits. If anything, food stamp users are being as EFFICIENT as possible in buying soda.
Until the day when a gallon of milk or fruit juice is cheaper than soda, until the day broccoli is cheaper than Kraft mac n’ cheese, and until the day a pound of meat is cheaper than a can of Chef Boyardee, food stamp users will continue to maximize their benefit by buying the cheapest food products out there. And unfortunately for all of us, non-food stamp users included, the cheapest foods in the market are often times the least healthy for us. There is actually good research out there validating this theory (see work of Adam Drewnowski, Univ of Washington). Restricting benefits to only “healthy foods” will only worsen the food insecurity and poverty so many food stamp users are facing.
Another:
I think it’s helpful to compare food stamps to another government food program: WIC. When I had my first child, my job paid very little and I qualified for the WIC assistance program. The foods that qualify are extremely limited: carrots, cheese, milk, eggs, formula, oatmeal, peanut butter, tuna, and a few other things. All of these foods help ensure the health of the mother and fetus, and later the infant. The cost of the foods is easily made back several times over by preventing health issues and pregnancy complications. Given that people who qualify for food stamps also often qualify for Medicaid, it’s in the government’s interest to ensure those people are eating healthy so they are less likely to develop disease.
Soda and candy eating correlate strongly to increased rates of obesity, diabetes, and many other diseases, and if people choose to eat these things, they should do it on their own dime.
(Photo of a bodega in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Clementine Gallot. Explanation of “EBT” here.)
The Dish 