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I'm not sure the value of this as a top level comment, but I'll write it because it struck me as odd. I live in California. I stopped by Grocery Outlet today after work to pick an ingredient up for dinner and some bleach for cleaning. I walk up to the checkout line with my $10 worth of groceries, and in front of me are two groups. The first group currently checking out are a couple, both guant, face sores, interesting clothing/jewelry/tattoo choices, and are buying food and water. I presume they are either living on the street or out of their vehicle and do drugs pretty consistently. They have a whole load of groceries and what caught my attention was the lady who requested the cashier to separate the mushroom mind focus and energy https://lairdsuperfood.com/products/focus-and-memory-mushrooms bags of snacks she was purchasing because if they weren't EBT eligible she would pay for them on her own. Luckily as I was to find out, they were, and she went on to make a separate purchase of those with her handy card.
Next up in the grocery line, we have a black lady, also buying significant amounts of groceries, and frankly she was a good 300 pounds #healthyatanysize. Luckily she had her handy card too.
Now I make decent money, but I sure feel like a shmuck when I'm the only one paying for my food in the grocery store line. Not sure what to add to this, I see the proposals to shrink EBT just to the essentials, only for people to be shocked as that would require people to make their food like me! Maybe this is what I get for living in California, but frankly, I think EBT and systems like it are just as prevalent elsewhere. It just strikes me as odd that I'm a professional, in a good industry, and I would question spending $50 for a couple of tiny packets of specialty mushroom superfood, but two methheads get to have it as they wish. Maybe I'm out of touch with the plights of the poor, but idk, doesn't seem half bad, I've car camped in the past before.
To be fair with the lady with the kid behind me, I did not stick around long enough to see if she too had her handy card with her, but I feel somewhat saddened that I am missing out on this club.
It reminds me in college, I had some hippy friends, they showed me the beauty of the college food kitchen. Just walk in, grab food, no worries. Oh yeah and btw since you're in a full college courseload, and your income is below the poverty threshold, despite being a dependent, you can apply to EBT, unemployment benefits, free health insurance, etc. Idk, I didn't partake, despite having years of less than stellar income and a strict budget. Maybe I should have? Is that just like any other tax loophole? What's the difference between saving money via that, and wash selling bitcoin shares to offset other investment income or other such schemes which I don't necessarily disagree with morally.
The other thing I think of when I roll this over in my head, is the stratification of grocery stores as a class separator. The last few years my closest store has been Ralphs. For those of you who don't know, Ralphs is slightly more high-end than Grocery Outlet which is more bottom of the barrel. Shoppers of Ralphs are probably not going to encounter EBT users at the same rates in areas with many grocery stores. Think Target vs. Walmart. The effect I feel like this has is for those contributing more to the tax pool, they encounter the absurdity of the purchasers less, and therefore the blob of money dedicated to it is further from the mind.
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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