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This is not necessarily true in the case of "spending". Calories are actually very cheap, because rice exists and is far cheaper than any other foodstuff (it tastes lousy by itself, but a little butter and salt fix that). I eat quite frugally ($60 a week or so AUD, a bit over $40 USD) and I could double my caloric intake (and swell up like a balloon) for maybe an additional 10% on that (and that's with the decent rice, over twice the price of the true cheap stuff!). It's everything else that costs real money (particularly meat), because rice has negligible amounts of anything but calories.
In practice, most people don't eat as frugally as I do, but... yeah, price of a diet and calories of a diet are not closely related. (Also, do remember that while calories expended do go up somewhat as you become obese - because of the extra work hauling yourself around, and the nonzero metabolism of fat tissue - it's not actually that strong an effect; being twice the weight doesn't require twice the calories or even close.)
First, if you increased your food budget to double your needed caloric intake I would still say you're overspending, even if your expenses are relatively low compared to others. It'd just usually not be any business of mine if I'm not paying for it.
As your current food budget is showing, you don't need that much food. Ideally SNAP would be giving exactly as much as is needed to top up the person's budget to the point where they can eat healthily, but targeting a program this accurately is unreasonable.
Second, is this actually how a significant amount of obese people are eating? Getting fat on rice flavored with butter and salt sounds difficult. Nor do I think people would be complaining about an obese person purchasing a cart full of vegetables and rice with SNAP - I think the complaints implicitly include that they saw carts full of typical junk food that is easy to overeat and get fat on.
I'm not fat, and I'm willing to put that down to genetics & metabolism rather than any personal virtue, but I can absolutely house a very large amount of rice with butter & salt. Or noodles with butter & salt. Or bread, with salted butter so thick you can see tooth marks.
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That's very similar macros to the Cajun dietary staple(rice and gravy is slightly more nutritious, but it's close enough for government work). If you go to southern Louisiana you will see many very fat people whose diet consists largely of rice covered in stock and roux with some meat, which costs approximately as much as rice flavoured with butter and has a very similar nutrient profile.
I'll take your word for it. It's definitely plausible on a calories/dollar metric, I was more surprised to hear you can eat that much rice without running into problems with stomach size. I find it quite filling and it's not a snack food you can nibble on throughout the day.
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A Cajun diet is cheap, I spend less per person than food stamps allots. But a big chunk of the food stamps target population can’t cook, may face some additional frictions(lack of consistent kitchen access for the poorest is a real thing), and or just refuses to eat healthy from scratch meals. Yes fixing these problems would be good but nobody really knows how to do that.
Oh, don't I know it. My point was more the (lack of) proportionality; one can eat way more calories for way less money, so someone who's obese isn't necessarily spending more than someone who isn't.
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