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I mostly see food stamps users buying food in quantities that are clearly supporting a family, not an individual, and usually what I consider a quite reasonable grocery cart(potato chips to pack in your lunch don’t seem that out of line when you’ve got tons of other food in there). This is difficult to resent.
Granted, I shop mostly at Aldi, which has a different clientele(that is, people who cook at least a little bit and are at least mildly cost-conscious). Is it possible that restricting junk from food stamps is desirable? Sûre, but I think you’re significantly underrating the actual difficulty in doing this without banning eg canned green beans on accident. Likewise I don’t have a huge problem with saying ‘no steak on food stamps’- sûre, if the taxpayers are paying for your luxuries then we’re paying too much, thats fair. But I think the government attempting to actually enact this rule would probably ban Salisbury steaks, chicken fried steaks, etc, and then Walmart would figure out how to reclassify ribeyes.
I think any attempt to ban categories of items is doomed to fail. There really are no strict categories once you get down in the weeds of what's available at a typical grocery store. Or, there's as many categories as there are products, which isn't helpful at all. I advocate for starting from zero and adding foods you want people to purchase. Surely "whole raw onions" does not accidentally also cover something in the frozen frankenfood aisle.
Yes, it would be hard to do this and there'd be gnashing of teeth, etc. A big problem is that most people don't know how to cook. What used to be a survival skill at some point became a luxury hobby in some sense and for some people. I don't know what we should do about that. Maybe just live with the fact that the very poor will eat like the blue collar/lower middle class.
Correct, people don't know how to cook, but you're way overrating how good of a cook most women were in 1950 or whenever. When America was much poorer a high percentage of the population just ate unappetizing food. If you were stuck eating whatever you and your wife could throw together, you ate it regardless of quality.
As a society, we've decided that noone should have to eat unappetizing but cheap food. School lunches don't serve those weird rectangular pizzas anymore. Workplace and college cafeterias have professional chefs. Those box services have no stigma(and also no profit); hellofresh and factor and the like come off as responsible coded in a way that TV dinners used to be seen as an occasional extravagance that was only acceptable if you had kids to feed and a lot of overtime or something. The lower middle class does not eat rice and beans at home(or vegetables of any kind); they eat fast food, frozen dinners, pizza, etc- just like the welfare dependent poor. 'Having to eat bland food' is the lot of the world's poor historically, but it's an indignity that, in America, is reserved solely for prisoners.
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There already are categories for SNAP EBT: you can't use it for hot foods (rotisserie chicken is probably the most common complaint). WIC also exists and has comparatively tiny set of eligible products.
We should do better about teaching basic cooking, though. Removal of life skills from k-12 education (compared to what my parents' generation talks about: home ec, shop class, etc) has been, IMO, a bad choice overall. Although I'm not sure I'd bring those back exactly as they were.
That's exactly my point. They're trying to say what people aren't allowed to buy and it's too hard to get right. Instead they should only say what people are allowed to buy. And rotisserie chicken should be one of those things IMO (whole chicken, cooked on premise, no breading... or something specific like that so it doesn't accidently include hungry man chicken dinner or KFC). And anything not on the allowed list won't be covered by food stamps. But I'm not a policy expert on this topic (or any topic) and there are probably good reasons why it isn't done this way.
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