At the grocery store today, a couple in front of me had a cart full of chips, single-serving sized sugar drinks (like “Hugs” or “Squeezits” or whatever), Hostess donuts, Chips Ahoy, and the like. I watched her scan her food stamp / direction card, to the tune of $98. To be fair, they did buy the economy pack of chicken breasts. But it was 95% junk.
I’m thinking that 1) her food stamp dollar would stretch further by buying ingredients and cooking her own food; 2) not buying junk food would reduce the obsesity epidemic, and therefore, the use of food stamps should have requirements to buy only ingredients, thereby maximizing usage, saving money and reducing healthcare costs. After all, why should I pay for you to eat junk food for dinner?
The only exceptions I can think of are cold cereal and crackers (although perhaps with a certain sugar/weight ratio), I’m sure there’s a few more, but by and large, it should be a requirement, and would be easily enforced (by way of tagging certain food types / barcodes).
Are you going to teach people to cook and give them all the stuff necessary to prepare their own food as well?
Even if your answer is ‘yes’, I don’t think it would be right to tell people what they should or shouldn’t eat. Granted, if you are giving them assistance you CAN tell them what they should or shouldn’t eat…I just don’t think it would be right to do so. I admit that MMV on this.
Many people on food stamps live in single rooms with no kitchen. It’s a big problem. What with needing first and last month’s rent and security deposits and utility deposits it can cost thousands of dollars to get into even a crappy apartment, and the SRO’s that cost more per day and have no cooking facilities are the only option. Once you’re in them it’s hard as hell to get out, because everything costs more.
Why is it we seem to only get to make all the lifestyle decisions for the poor? You think you aren’t paying increased health care costs for middle class fat people? Hell, even if every employee in my company was a billionaire but we had three heart attacks and one stroke out of 100 people you bet our premiums would go up next year, even if the other 96 were exceptionally healthy.
And for cooking all these ingredients, are you going to pay for pots and pans? A working stove? A refridgerator with a good crisper that will keep all the fruits and veggies from rotting?
I don’t know how easy it would be to categorize the thousands of food products out there, and we should also consider that a lot of people on food stamps are working (either both parents or single parents) w/ not a lot of free time to cook. As long as liquor and tobacco and other items like that aren’t allowed, I say let the people buy what they want.
Since a lot of people on food stamps are unemployed or underemployed, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to require them to spend more time preparing their food instead of working or looking for work. Maybe the program could be set up in such a way that food stamps spent on ingredients or healthier food go further, which might counteract the problem of unhealthy foods being so cheap.
I already said I was sure there are a few other exceptions, so let’s try not to focus on that too much. Canned soups such as cream of mushroom would count as ingredients; canned soups such as chicken noodle could count as a necessary convenience food, in the vein of cold cereal, however it is relatively easy to make and freeze chicken soup. However, frozen dinners are definitely not ingredients.
Lack of access to cooking facilities, time to cook, or even a permanent home should not preclude food assistance. Elderly people or the disabled who lack fine motor control to handle knives should not be precluded from food assistance.
I remember this was discussed in another thread some time ago. I don’t think making people just buy ingredients would work. Some of them don’t know how to cook; are not interested in learning how to cook (and who is going to teach them?); may not have proper equipment to cook with, or on; or don’t have time/energy (working two jobs) to cook. Education about healthy eating, how to buy nutritious things, how to stretch a food dollar - that might be helpful. What in the world would you expect 9 out of 10 people who get food stamps to do with sacks of flour and sugar, and bottles of cooking oil??? Maybe they cook from scratch in Africa or Indonesia, but not in the US.
I’m not denying that we aren’t paying increased health costs for middle-class fat people; however, we are not subsidizing the unhealthy eating habits that helped make them fat.
I think the argument is that you are subsidizing those eating habits. You’re just paying for the medical treatment caused by the eating habits instead of directly paying for the food. So the argument goes that if the medical costs weren’t covered, the eating habits might change. (Given people’s difficulty in dealing with far-off health problems, though, they probably wouldn’t.) I don’t think it follows that society should restrict anybody else’s diet but there is some merit to the argument.
If you start trying to classify things, you won’t be able to avoid being bogged down with definitions and exceptions.
And what makes you think people with EBT cards have the facilities to make giant batches of homemade soup and stow them in freezers? Where are they going to get these big freezers? Are you going to buy them? Where are you going to put them in tiny, studio apartments?
I don’t think you have any real idea of the space and facilities a lot of these people have to work with. They quite often don’t have anything more than a microwave oven and a hotplate and maybe a small, reach-in cooler. It also takes time to do homemade food, and people who are working two or three jobs don’t have the time or energy to make a casserole from scratch when they get home.