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Comment by hi41 | Hacker News Reader

Food stamps, to foster good health, must exclude unhealthy items. I have seen people buying potato chips and sugary soda drinks in exchange for food stamps at convenience stores in Brooklyn. How is this practice even okay? If we want healthy population then food stamps must fruits and vegetables but must exclude soda and chips.

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you know how much fruit/vegetables cost right? stop policing what people buy with their food stamps.

what's the #1 item people on SNAP buy? Soda. what's the #2 item people not on SNAP buy? Soda. What's the #2 item on SNAP? Milk #1 on non-SNAP buyers? Milk

It's not much difference between what people on SNAP and not on SNAP buy. It's just people not minding their own business because they think people don't deserve food stamps.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/food-stamps-diet_n_582f4bd7e4...

You want to force people to buy healthier food? Provide more for food stamps.

What makes you think they'll buy more healthier food instead of just getting even more junk? That's like giving more heroin to a junky in hopes that'll he'll shoot up less.

OP said we should restrict items to healthier foods. My response to that is I'm for that if you increase the amount to match the cost of fruits, vegetables, and meats.

And honestly comparing people on food stamps to heroin junkies is disgusting. These people aren't addicted to potato chips. There are obviously people who abuse the SNAP program but you think people want to remain fat and unhealthy? The amount given to people on SNAP is not enough to pay for healthy foods. So given the choice between eating potato chips and not eating.. What options are you giving them?

I think anyone who overindulges in soda and other junk are junkies. The people who buy them off SNAP are no better. I think it may be a lack of education or cultural or even psychological thing. If the SNAP isn't providing enough, and you have this little amount of money to spend on soda and chips which provide 10x more pleasure than spending the same money on some fruit, I would probably be a junkie too. (Personally I have lived like that before). But I doubt that giving more money would help unless we try to push people toward better options at the same time. Now I avoid soda(especially) and junk like the plague, because I've changed my mindset and outlook on things. For me, it's better to eat less overall(not enough calories) or just miss the meal until the next opportunity than eating junk food. That's because I've experienced what consuming that trash is like versus eating healthily. But other people may not have the same experience or education or culture to reach the same conclusion. I am quite fond of the Japanese portion sizes for instance. I'm also really into fasts. I think everyone should learn that you don't need to always be eating 3-4 meals every single day outside of specific situations.

> For me, it's better to eat less overall(not enough calories) or just miss the meal until the next opportunity than eating junk food.

This is called an eating disorder.

Well that's uncalled for. I regularly lift weights and consider myself fairly healthy. I have an eating disorder if I skip a meal in a scenario where the only option is junk food?

To be fair, I skip the meal until I get a chance to eat something nice, and I'll usually eat an extra big meal to make up for the missed one.

The more I think about it, the more I convince myself that charitable food security benefits should not be distributed as a cash-equivalent.

Food stamps don't bring grocery stores into food deserts. And food stamps don't stop the corner store from charging $2/lb for bananas when a suburban grocery store is charging $0.60/lb for them.

If you pump more money into EBT/SNAP/WIC, the bananas go up to $3/lb, and the people still get fat while hungry. There's always a way for someone to siphon the value out of a cash entitlement benefit.

I think food security might be better served in the short term by using the funds to buy market baskets similar to those provided by farm shares, and deliver the food directly to the recipients, or at least to walkable distribution points. In the long term, the money has to be used to produce a surplus of food beyond what the cash market currently provides, to be put into a separate supply chain that is resistant to diversion or manipulation by middlemen.

This goes hand-in-hand with housing security, where the government builds new housing units, to rent or condo, then uses some percentage of them for housing-insecure people, at reduced cost to them. It doesn't do as much good to get a free (to you) 10# bag of government potatoes if you don't have anywhere to safely cook them.

You can't push a string. You can't pull sand.

Pumping more money into a community is not going to change anything when its defining characteristic is that the mechanisms to move money out are already limited by the amount of money left inside.

This already exists in a form alongside SNAP, called TEFAP[1]. Except food isn't directly distributed to receipts, instead it goes to soup kitchens, food pantries, local distribution organizations and the like.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Emergency_Food_Assis...

What if you are eating processed food because you don't have the time, place, ability, or necessary tools to cook? What if you live in a food desert and you do not have reliable transportation to take you to a grocery with fresh foods? What if you have Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder and are also poor? Should you then just starve?

For "food deserts", this can be fixed by requiring places to offer a good selection of quality healthy items in order to be able to accept food stamps. This will work, as long as the food stamp based income is significant enough for those shops (they wouldn't want to give up that revenue just to avoid adjusting their inventory). Same with a requirement to serve those with dietary restrictions.

For the affordability issue, healthy items can be classified as getting a discount on the food stamps. This can be implemented with food stamps plus coupons (that are only good when used in conjunction with them).

The requirement you describe is often why convenience stores have a basket with one or two each of Red Delicious apples, bananas, and navel oranges, with a sign saying "fruit $2"

It the same sort of dodge as defining ketchup or pizza sauce as a serving of vegetables in school lunches. There's never going to be enough funding to enforce the spirit of the regulation instead of just the literal wording of it.

It seems like HN treads a lot of the same ground every time these things are discussed.

1. "Food deserts" are what happens when the demand for ideologically congenial explanations for socially inconvenient facts greatly exceeds the supply. There is an assumed causal directionality which turns out to not be supported. There's a lot of literature on food deserts (as typically stated) being more or less a meme since 2015, here's one example with a couple studies to back it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/upshot/giving-the-poor-ea...

> Another study, published this week as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked across the country and found that no more than a tenth of the variation in the food people bought could be explained by the availability of a nearby grocery store. The education level of the shoppers, for example, was far more predictive.

> because you don't have the time

Almost all data we have suggests poor people have more time too cook than middle class people. Examples abound: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-fre...

They may not have the resources/tools though.

Incorrect. Selecting what poor people do with resources as an answer just avoids the problem of rich people choosing what the poor eat, which is the fundamental problem. Let's keep the blame properly placed here.

Unhealthy items are cheaper than healthy items. If I'm on a limited budget and have to get enough food for a week, I'm not getting nearly as many fruits and vegetables as I would otherwise. Pasta is $1/lb and store-brand sauce is $2/jar, suddenly I can make 2 meals for $1.50 each. It's very cheap to buy carb-heavy items that don't have much else in the way of nutrition so of course that's what people buy when funds are limited.

But doesn't your assertion support his argument?

If unhealthy items are cheaper than healthy ones, then unrestricted food stamps will not work as intended. You must restrict them to only healthy items because unhealthy items are cheaper.

(Massive caveat: Big disagreements between people over what is healthy. But there is less disagreement over what things, e.g. soda, are unhealthy.)

Fuck poor people for wanting to eat things I don't want them to eat. How dare they have even a little bit of luxury.

Seriously, the attitudes of so many people on here are absolutely disgusting. Why don't we throw all the poor people in camps while we're at it?

I know it's very big brother-like or big government-like but why not require people on SNAP to take a nutrition class periodically as well as restrict what kinds of things can be purchased with SNAP? Would peddlers of junk-food erupt in protest overt that?

Is it really any more "big brother" than the government literally giving you an allowance to purchase food with?

I think at that point things like prohibiting junk food, or having to take a nutrition class, is barely moving the needle any further.

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