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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.
Everyone who has thought about the policy design says that you should just give people money. Money is fungible, so if you restrict EBT to actual necessities (i.e. things someone paid cash would need to buy anyway) then you are not modifying their budget constraint. There is no policy design behind eligibility lists for this kind of benefit, and nobody has suggested one (as opposed to grandstanding particular examples of upmarket food being bought with an EBT card). In particular, products are eligible for WIC because the industries that make them bribe politicians and/or employ a lot of people in swing states.
Going back to @tomottoe's OP, the practical effect of making fancy mushrooms EBT-ineligible was that someone who had enough cash-plus-EBT income to afford them had to split one transaction into two, delaying @tomottoe and everyone else in the queue behind them. If you phase out SNAP rather than cliff-edging it (which as a matter of creating correct incentives, you should), then there will exist people with jobs and EBT cards who have cash-plus-EBT income sufficient to afford an occasional small luxury, which will sometimes be food. Making said small luxury EBT-ineligible achieves nothing.
The people who think it is worth modifying SNAP so you can't buy luxuries with EBT cards are mostly people who think the programme shouldn't exist at all.
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