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.
Some breakfast cereals or snack bars are just as loaded with sugar as candy. And I’m sure the ban doesn’t include juice either which is not much better than soda. And if the ban is broad enough it might include sugar-free sparkling water.
While soda and candy are really frivolities they’re also not a guaranteed cause of health issues. The ban doesn’t force people to eat lean protein and vegetables or a well-balanced diet in general so this is mostly a play to make SNAP recipients more miserable. Whether that encourages people to work harder to buy their own junk food or steal junk food I don’t think they care.