Pearl River There have always been restrictions on what can be bought with food stamps. Booze, beer, and cigarettes have always been banned, but the new bans are extensive, arbitrary, and paternalism on steroids. Sure, sugar isn’t good for people, neither is soda pop, but is this really and truly about what’s best for SNAP recipients, or is this really about setting punitive boundaries on poor people’s purchases? The implementation process seems the latter more than the former.
In full disclosure, I’ve lived in a MAHA household for decades. My children were discouraged from drinking tap water. Only turkey hotdogs were allowed, and they were frowned on. Pork chops and hamburgers were things you could eat on the road or at my parents’ house, but not where we lived. We were regularly instructed about “white death,” meaning white flour, white sugar, and salt. The MAHA moms have nothing on me.
The first states are starting to rollout the new rules for SNAP rules mandated by the USDA, which runs the program, and informed by the federal Department of Health Services. In an interesting catch-22 the federales left it to the states to figure out which items were forbidden and which ones were still OK. Obviously, this will mean a patchwork quilt between states, but it will also mean grocery shopping for the poor will become an endless catch-and-release system at the cash register, once they try to puzzle their way through the aisles. Nebraska for example put out a list of 6000 banned items. Tell me how a shopper and their grocery store are going to make all of this work easily? Of the early states, only Nebraska and Texas attached the product codes to the list, which makes it a bit easier for the stores to sort this out, but doesn’t help recipients at all, since the lists aren’t easily available to them.
This is one of those roads paved to hell with good intentions, perhaps. Advocates aren’t wrong to want sugar out of diets to curb obesity, diabetes, and other maladies. The food producers and sellers should be the natural target for these campaigns, and the government could promulgate regulations mandating what should and should not be produced. This campaign is solely directed at the poorest of Americans, who are eligible for and receiving food stamps, stigmatizing and infantilizing these families, while letting the good and gooey times continue to roll for all others.
As many have pointed out, this also leads to arbitrary and crazy restrictions. In Iowa, one of the first five states implementing the program, Pop-Tarts, which everyone knows are evil, are OK, and so are “Scooby-Doo graham crackers, but Welch’s fruit snacks? No.” In Idaho, you can buy a Twix candy bar, a totally guilty pleasure, “but not a flourless granola bar with chocolate chips.” In Virginia, you can buy “sweetened tea and lemonade, but not some brands of sparkling, sweetened fruit juice. The opposite will be true in Texas.” Supposedly, the items are listed on Iowa and Nebraska websites, but that would also mean that lower income families have newly become exempted from the digital divide. Tell me this isn’t arbitrary and capricious Big Brother stuff!
In a classic “unfunded mandate,” the governments are making grocery and food sellers the enforcers. If they are discovered selling forbidden items, they could be bounced out of the food stamp program, which would cripple many, especially the small mom-and-pops who are left in many of the food deserts that are go-to stores for the poor. Larger sellers are reporting up to 500 hours of work changing their payment-of-sale systems so that banned items are not allowed. More states are coming online with this program soon with five now, then thirteen more. USDA has given stores another 90 days to catch up, but let’s be honest, almost none of them will be able to run perfect operations the way this mess is being put into practice.
The real police for now are lower income, working families, who are being forced to self-regulate in order to avoid embarrassment at the cash register. Decades ago, I can remember when we won reforms to prevent lower income families from been humiliated at the register, when they had to pull out their food stamps, while others used cash. Electronic cards have mitigated that, but in the punitive policies that plague the poor, now we will have another one masked as health, but administered as shame.