Americans in five states who get government help paying for groceries will see new limits starting Thursday on soda, candy and other foods they can buy with those benefits.

Starting Thursday, Americans in five states who get government help paying for groceries will see new restrictions on soda, candy and other foods they can buy with those benefits.

Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah and West Virginia are the first of at least 18 states to enact waivers prohibiting the purchase of certain foods through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

It’s part of a push by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to urge states to strip foods regarded as unhealthy from the $100 billion federal program – long known as food stamps – that serves 42 million Americans.

“We cannot continue a system that forces taxpayers to fund programs that make people sick and then pay a second time to treat the illnesses those very programs help create,” Kennedy said in a statement in December.

  • bort@piefed.worldEnglish
    54·
    2 days ago

    Cake is not nutrition. I think it should ban all ultra processed Nova class 4 products.

    • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      131·
      2 days ago

      Is butter nutrition? Is flour? Is anything with added sugar automatically ‘not nutrition’?

      Allowing poor people to buy the ingredients to make cake but not a cheaper premade cake (or probably a boxed cake mix either under the vibes-based Nova classification system) just makes it so that they have to add even more work to their lives to achieve normalcy for themselves and their kids. Let them buy their kids a birthday cake.

      The desire to have total control over every food poor people can buy is nuts. Worry about what you eat. Go into the community and hold free cooking classes if you’re that worried about other people. ‘I’m so worried for you that I’m restricting your choices’ isn’t worry, it’s moralizing.