Comment by peteyestee@feddit.org on RFK Jr. says he’s working to stop food stamps buying soda and candy

Boo to high fructose!

I hate high fructose too but doing this is just unnecessarily shitting on the poor.

Because if it’s bad, it’s bad for everybody. Buying food using SNAP benefits doesn’t magically transform it into something unhealthy. Given that’s the case, we should just ban soda and candy for everybody. But, that’s not the proposal. Presumably, people with more money have the self-control to make informed, rational decisions about whether to buy it? Not like those poors, who can’t be trusted not to blow all of their limited funds on junk food. (<-- There it is. There’s the shitting on the poor part.)

There seems to be some correlation between cavities and children in low income homes. There is likely a number of factors to this, but junk food I believe seems to be one of them.

https://www.cdc.gov/oral-health/php/2024-oral-health-surveillance-report/selected-findings.html

However, maybe more to your point, the issue is also accessibility to healthy foods at reasonable prices. Additionally, likely parent education about how fucking awful soda and candy is.

If that’s the issue, banning soda and candy for everybody would also improve things for poor kids.

I mean, I wouldn’t disagree.

Not like those poors, who can’t be trusted not to blow all of their limited funds on junk food. (<-- There it is. There’s the shitting on the poor part.)

This dramatically undervalues the predatory practices of snack food companies, and redirects the blame. This is a problem solved by regulation, but the people that most need to be protected by those regulations are the poor, who are targeted for exploitation by the companies producing cheap, processed “foods.”

RFK is a dangerous idiot, and his handful of seemingly okay policy ideas only exist to distract from the harm that the administration, he is part of, is doing. This is one of those policies. It will never be anything more than a headline in any meaningful way.

This isn’t a new effort that Brainworm Guy came up with. It’s been part of Republican ideology, and bogus stories about people “buying steak and lobster and eating better than me with my tax money” have been circulating among their base for several decades. (Think back to Ronald Reagan talking about “welfare queens” driving around in Cadillacs.) The hidden agenda is to saddle the SNAP program with so many bureaucratic costs, like policing whether people’s choices are healthy enough, that they can point to it as an example of government waste, and cut it.

Plenty of non-poor people eat cheap, processed “foods,” too. Target the real problem, protect everybody, instead of infantilizing poor people as too stupid to make their own decisions.

Soda is probably cheaper than water in USA. /S

Cheaper than bottled water, sure. Clean water comes out of everyone’s tap, a limitless supply that costs pennies

In some places it even has ~~electrolytes~~ lead, what MAGA brains crave!

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RFK Jr. says he’s working to stop food stamps buying soda and candy(www.newsnationnow.com)

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