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I would like to call out that I explicitly rejected providing Hello Fresh in my proposal, but rather a service that is similar in operation to Hello Fresh but explicitly more economical - spaghetti without meat, etc.
It's not so much that poor people aren't deserving of treats, or that they need to fix their obesity before getting the government dole. It's that the food someone eats directly contributes to their obesity and health issues, which we then have to pay for as well. There is a lot of crossover between people on Medicaid and SNAP.
I think it's not compassionate at all to just throw people to the wilderness without teaching them how to cook healthy food, what healthy food looks like from the store, what they should buy, etc. We used to teach this in High School, but we no longer do outside of a half semester health/gym class.
It's not compassionate to sit by as they eat their way to poor health and all the suffering that corresponds to that.
At the end of the line, it's not compassionate to the tax payer to spend their money on wrecking the health of the poor, and then pay to try to treat the symptoms of their metabolic disease. It's like a version of this meme.
I think it accurate to say that my positions on this does stem from the Conservative Principle that, "there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent."
Largely, it is within human nature to get fat and sick when eating potato chips and soda. We may be able to come up with medicines to combat this, but the underlying human nature is enduring and constant. It is morally true that it is an injustice to make someone dig a hole and then fill it in. Similarly it is an enduring truth that it is immoral to make someone pay to make someone get sick, and then make them pay to extend their life in an unhealthy state.
Notably, I'm not even putting moral judgement on the people on SNAP here. I don't blame them for not having been taught these skills, I'm not trying to punish them for their flaws, I'm just trying to imagine a way to help them that helps more than hurts.
Piggybacking to say: I said issue MREs because we were talking about a post-scarcity, UBI situation where AI and robots are doing all the work. What does "this meal costs $21 to make" even mean in that situation? What the hell is a dollar if all commerce has stopped?
If we're truly in a post-scarcity situation then why are we eating MREs? That seems like a dystopian hellscape.
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To say that poorer people have worse diets than wealthier people, and that people on SNAP have the worst diets of all is trivially true, but the USDA studies these things, and the difference isn't that stark. They categorize consumption into different categories, some positive and some negative, and score each category, generating a total score where 100 is ideal. Households earning 350% or more of the poverty line have an average score of 60. Households earning 115% or lower have a score of 57. Households in between have a score of 57. SNAP households have a score of 55. Keeping that in mind, if you look at the Thrifty Food Plan guidelines you'll see that they recognize 15 different age-sex categories with different nutritional requirements for each, which means that your spaghetti would need a dozen or so different versions to avoid, say, allotting a full portion to a small child. And then you combine that giving each person in a household a different meal to be cooked isn't efficient, so you'd have to synchronize and package them to be cooked all at once, and now you get into all the possible permutations you'd need to accommodate every household represented, and that's before you account for vegetarian, kosher, gluten free, peanut allergy, sesame allergy... you get the idea. Complicating this even further is the fact that while the maximum monthly benefit is around $10/person/day the average is more like $6/person/day, which means that a typical SNAP household is still buying a significant amount of food with their own money, at which point the entire system collapses anyway.
I'm not sure how much you could really expect the scores to creep up? How much would they have to go up to justify this level of complexity? 10 points? 20 points? Even with all perfect hundreds you're still only talking about 10% or so of the population. If the medical risks are so high should we impose similar dietary requirements on Medicare recipients (i.e. almost everyone over 65)? Would you be okay if your employer told you that to maintain your health insurance you had to buy a meal kit subscription with your own money on the theory that if you had to pay for it anyway it you'd eat those meals and not junk, saving the insurance company money? What you're describing massively overcomplicates the system in order to chase a dubious benefit. That's why I didn't bring health up in my initial post—it's not as much of a factor as people think it is.
I acknowledge the complexity, which is why I recommended a team of chefs and nutritionists to come together with suitable options that the individual can select from every week. Given the sheer number of people on food assistance, there would be plenty of room for economy of scale, even with such variety.
But see, that would be my own money. It would mean my employer is offering worse benefits, and if I wanted to I could switch jobs to find better benefits. Maybe I'd find the meal kits more convenient, it would be worth trying out for a couple weeks while I job hunted if they were affordable.
If it is for free? Hell yeah I'd sign up. Maybe I would sometimes supplement and buy more things with my own money.
The disconnect is that SNAP isn't some cosmic law of nature. It's charity, and we can sometimes decide if another form of charity is better. There is a user above me who says they loved stuff like this as a poor child, because it meant actual food in the house.
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