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Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

Something like 10% of SNAP benefits go towards purchases of soda pop and other sugary drinks made by PepsiCo/etc.

It’s heartbreaking, but not surprising. When you’re dealing with limited resources, constant stress, and often living in areas where healthy options are harder to access or more expensive, sugary drinks can feel like an affordable comfort. Instead of judging SNAP recipients, we should be looking at the systems that make soda more accessible than clean, appealing , and fresh food.

Another take would also just be that it hardly proves they don't drink water, just that they also like something else.

But the "soda" category these days is also pretty overloaded: full sugar coke vs Coke zero is a very different calory intake.

Coke zero is still murder on your teeth, though. (And not fluoridated, of course.)

Are SNAP recipients not allowed to enjoy a soda at all? I really don't understand the problem with this. Society acts like signing up for SNAP involves signing a contract to lose 100 pounds and only eat iceberg lettuce or something.

No, but I think spending 10% of your food budget on soda is unfortunate regardless. Of course they have a right to it.

Americans seem to love to gatekeep what the poor are allowed to have or not have. They have this image of the Welfare Queen driving a pink Cadillac to cash her welfare checks at the liquor store. It seems that no matter how desperately destitute someone might be, there's a person who will point at something they have, whether it's a tent to sleep in under a bridge (a gift from an organization providing assistance to the houseless), a bicycle that's their only means of transportation, or a garden planted on public property, and say "they can't be that poor if they have that!

When someone lives off of public benefit, there's a sense in which the public can have an interest in how the money is used -- its use should correlate with its intent.

That's why SNAP money is restricted to particular categories. So caring about how it's spent is already a foregone conclusion, and rightly so.

If someone wants to spend money however they like, they'll have to earn it themselves. Even inherited money carries a sense of obligation to honor the family with how it's used (like not blowing it all in a week of lavish partying in Vegas, as an extreme example).

If an individual spends 10% of their SNAP benefits on soda, they’ve spent about ~$30 over a month on it, which is ten 20fl oz drinks. People drinking a bit more than a gallon of soda per month only supports the notion that they can subsist on that without any water if you believe that they categorically have some sort of exceptional unhuman biology.

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