Why have food stamps just be for food....

Today's Post: Monday, 10-25-2010

A few days ago a local columnist did a column speaking against the idea of having food stamps NOT be usable to buy soft drinks.

His take was that this was telling the people getting food stamps what to do in a demeaning way.

So, for that reason making it so food stamps cannot be used to by soft drinks was a bad idea.

I think this misses the point in two ways and is a surprisingly bad idea.

1. Getting food stamps is a hassle at best and is itself demeaning. But it’s not as bad as having no food. Having the people who sign people up for food stamps be courteous and compassionate and easy to work with would make sense to minimize such feelings while applying. But having a way to help these people earn the money they really need would help most.

Making food stamps work for nonfood items for people who are short on money right now misses the point I think. Pretending that they have more money instead of food stamps won’t boost their self-esteem.

2. The idea for food stamps is to help these people get food for themselves and their children. If they can be used for soft drinks, the people getting them will get less of the food that is the purpose of providing them with food stamps. Oops!


But the key point is one that the columnist clearly doesn’t know.

Drinking both regular and diet soft drinks makes people fat in ways that tend to produce fatness to the level of obesity and cause type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Just today, it was in the health news that obesity in children was found to create hardening of the arteries and cause heart disease due to this blood vessel damage.

People with lower incomes already tend to eat foods that do this. Those that drink soft drinks regularly are even more likely to get these diseases and become obese. They may well be two or three times as likely to do so in fact.

Having their food stamps that are issued in hopes of helping them out instead help giving them type 2 diabetes and heart disease by enabling them to buy soft drinks is NOT doing them any favors. It’s actually harmful to them physically.

But it gets even worse than that. By helping the women and older girls who get food stamps get more soft drinks and become fatter, other recent studies show they are much LESS likely to get jobs at all or get jobs that pay decently.

So, having food stamps buy soft drinks will help cause them to be actively discriminated against in the workplace.

Unfortunately, that will make them feel demeaned far more than not being able to use their food stamps to buy soft drinks!

Last but far from least, many of these people are young and single. If they are enabled to get fatter by drinking more soft drinks, the fat they’ll gain will make them less attractive and cause them to feel demeaned in that way.

That is true even more for boys than girls and it’s true for both boys and girls.

In short, because of what soft drinks do to the people who drink them often and because soft drinks are not food, people who get food stamps should not be able to buy soft drinks with them.

And, if you care about them being physically hurt and feeling pushed around and demeaned, that too is a reason NOT to have them allowed to buy soft drinks with the food stamps they receive.