Fruit juice is, you guessed it, juice from fruits. And that juice is 99% sugar water.
At some point we have to give up trying to micromanage people on food stamps. Yeah, it’s our money so we get to decide what restrictions to put on that money. I’m claiming that just because we can doesn’t mean we should. The juice vs soda example is a crystallized example. Juice is healthy, soda is unhealthy? Except they are both sugar and water. The fruit juice might contain a few trace vitamins or something, but they literally add synthetic Vitamin C to juice just so it can say “high in vitamin C”.
Is the point to keep people from starving? We could just do like the Romans used to do and hand out a weekly grain allotment. You won’t starve on that, right? Or are we trying to micromanage the health of people on welfare? If we’re doing that, maybe actual health care might be in order? Or are we just offended at the poor buying food that we don’t approve of?
To go back to the original question, poor people on food stamps can buy a lot of calories worth of food for very little money. Food is very inexpensive compared to our national budget. So we could save some money if we just handed out 10 kilo sacks of wheat every month. But the problem is not that people in America are so poor they’re in danger of starving to death. Our budget is not so strained that all we can afford is to prevent starvation.
If you read older books you often come across the interesting spectacle of people living in some garret apartment starving to death, or having to sell their coat to buy food. Yes, in the 1800s that garret apartment was dirt cheap, but food was very expensive, and a coat was even more expensive. Imagine trying to sell a used coat today to buy food. In that world, an obese poor person was impossible, because if you had enough money to buy enough food to become fat you couldn’t be poor.
But we don’t live in that world. In 2017 America food is super cheap, super convenient, super calorie dense, and scientifically designed to taste good. Literally scientifically designed. They have actual scientists figuring out ways to make the pleasure centers of your brain light up like a pinball game when you eat snack food.
And so in 2017 lots and lots of people are fat, rich and poor and middle class. And even the poor can get enough extra calories to put on extra pounds, because those extra calories don’t cost that much. It’s not that complicated. The poor are fatter than they used to be for the same reasons that everyone is fatter than they used to be. And the extent to which poor people are more likely to be fatter than average is the extent to which they experience those same reasons more often.