In 2010 the City of New York had a novel idea – to ban the use of Food Stamps to our purchase soda and other sugar sweetened beverages for two years. Last week Patrick McGeehan wrote in the New York Times that the USDA (US Department of Agriculture), which oversees the Food Stamp program, denied New York’s request, with the McGeehan stating:
…an administrator of the food stamp program in Washington said the city’s proposed experiment would have been “too large and complex” to implement and evaluate.
You can read the full article here. One of our values relates to being good stewards of public dollars, while others speak to optimizing health. What are your thoughts on this decision?
I can’t speak to the complexity argument used in the article but I do not agree with the idea of discrimination against the poor or any insult to poor people’s food decison-making. I believe I’m right when I notice that a few other things are not covered by food stamps, without any intended insult to stamp users. I don’t think that alcoholic beverages are considered to be food. Are there others? Chewing tobacco is put in the mouth but not food…are vitamins food?
A helpful research topic might be a food-value classification system to move food stamps closer to the WIC program.
WIC is not designed for a adult or teenager with varying needs and diets, a blue collar construction worker on SNAP, may need high calories, compared to a office also to ban vitamin water and gatorade but not grape juice and strawberry chocolate milk is not only unhealthy wise, but hypocrisy for politicians, similar to how a hedge fund manager or a company lobbies congress to get a lower tax rate then most folks pay, similar they lobby congress for these issues, fruit juice for instance is simply sugar,water and small vitamin
amounts are either present or added in, florida citrus growers promoted OJ to sell their items, so fruit juices are essentially just as bad as vitamin water/gatorade/coke if not worse if sugar is higher, however they are not banned, so who’s lobbying congress, and its not a novel idea.