NBC: Gov. Abbott asks USDA to approve waiver banning junk food purchases with SNAP benefits

Lost Witness · Monday at 10:30 AM

let's prohibit all

RDKirk said:
Otherwise, they'll always be forced into cheaper junk food

Junk food is cheap.
Without it being an option many will likely end up malnourished or worse with the costs of everything still going up

RDKirk · Monday at 10:32 AM

Laodicean60 said:
Yes, so is healthcare because of these foods.

That sounds like a nicely snappy sound bite, but it ignores a lot of realities of lower-working class life.

Laodicean60 said:
In time, it will pay for itself, and this might not be a bad idea. Remember TV dinners when we were young, I loved them, then in the 80's non-alcoholic fatty liver became a thing.

The evil chemicalized food genie is out of the bottle.

Laodicean60 said:
Maybe not, if we could force them to stop poisoning us, then we could open their market back up. Food coloring and other chemicals, nutrients stripped because of processing, fewer hormones.....

Bad science because Eisenhower had a heart attack, we concluded that cholesterol was a cause, thus the low-fat diet, and ignored a European scientist who said sugar increased cholesterol. Seventy years later, eggs are a healthy food. I learned here how powerful the corn lobbyists are with ethanol, which lowers gas mileage, shocking.

It's not really bad science as much as it is lobby warfare.

I'm going to speculate here. This is proposal is coming from Abbot, who down here in Texas we know is for business, not for people. His real angle is always more profit for some Texas industry...we just don't know which at the moment.

Putting more government corporate welfare for so-called "more nutritious" foods rather than "junk food," betcha big bucks would probably be a bigger boon to the Texas cattle industry than it would be to the Kansas wheat and corn industry.

RDKirk · Monday at 10:32 AM

Lost Witness said:
let's prohibit all

Junk food is cheap.
Without it being an option many will likely end up malnourished or worse with the costs of everything still going up

Oh, they're still malnourished. They're just not hungry.

Laodicean60 · Monday at 10:33 AM

BCP1928 said:
Potatoes instead of taro or cassava for one, many new vegetables, substitutes for unavailable herbs and spices, things like that.

I've never heard of this stuff, but I learned more about whole foods visiting Mexico markets than I could ever learn from a grocery store. I agree that foreign women, like my wife, have a better handle on cooking whole foods and herbs than poor or rich American women when it comes to cooking. Now that my daughter has a family, they are always asking their mom how to cook certain things.

bèlla · Monday at 10:35 AM

Laodicean60 said:
I think this is an awesome idea and should be a Federal law. Food should be restricted to whole foods.

I don’t believe the government is required to fund an unhealthy diet. If you’re relying on them for SNAP you’re more likely to qualify for Medicaid. If we’re absorbing the costs of food and medical expenses restrictions are practical. Junk foods should be banned and home made meals should be prioritized. A course in home economics would be useful. Whether it’s delivered in person or streamed is debatable. But all recipients should be required to take it to receive benefits.

Many recipients receive extra benefits at farmers markets. Some double WIC coupons and triple the value of SNAP. Most people receiving benefits aren’t working full-time. Cooking shouldn’t be an issue nor making things from scratch. It’s a matter of priorities.

~bella

BCP1928 · Monday at 10:41 AM

Laodicean60 said:
I've never heard of this stuff, but I learned more about whole foods visiting Mexico markets than I could ever learn from a grocery store. I agree that foreign women, like my wife, have a better handle on cooking whole foods and herbs than poor or rich American women when it comes to cooking. Now that my daughter has a family, they are always asking their mom how to cook certain things.

And what if their mom doesn't know? Cooking from scratch requires more than just being forbidden to buy snack foods.

Laodicean60 · Monday at 10:47 AM

RDKirk said:
That sounds like a nicely snappy sound bite, but it ignores a lot of realities of lower-working class life.

Tell me about the lower working-class life. How was your life different?

RDKirk said:
The evil chemicalized food genie is out of the bottle.

Explain this snappy sound bite?

RDKirk said:
It's not really bad science as much as it is lobby warfare.

I'm going to speculate here. This is proposal is coming from Abbot, who down here in Texas we know is for business, not for people. His real angle is to more profit for someone in Texas...we just don't know who at the moment.

Putting more government corporate welfare for so-called "more nutritious" foods rather than "junk food," betcha big bucks would probably be a bigger boon to the Texas cattle industry than it would be to the Kansas wheat and corn industry.

I get it, Abbot is not in your tribe, but after all, it's his job to profit someone in Texas, not a corporation. What is wrong with the beef industry's profit? I also thought agricultural products were nutritional, but how do you come to your conclusion when:

"Under the Trump administration, for the first time since the program was authorized, states can take steps to eliminate the opportunity to buy junk food with SNAP benefits and assure that taxpayer dollars are used only to purchase healthy, nutritious food," Abbott said. "I look forward to the opportunities this approach will bring to improve the health and quality of life for low-income Texans."
"According to a report published by CNBC, USDA studies show that about 5% of SNAP benefits are spent on soda, and about 9% of SNAP spending goes toward “sweetened beverages,” which also include sports drinks, energy drinks, juices, and powder mixes."

BCP1928 · Monday at 10:48 AM

bèlla said:
I don’t believe the government is required to fund an unhealthy diet. If you’re relying on them for SNAP you’re more likely to qualify for Medicaid. If we’re absorbing the costs of food and medical expenses restrictions are practical. Junk foods should be banned and home made meals should be prioritized. A course in home economics would be useful. Whether it’s delivered in person or streamed is debatable. But all recipients should be required to take it to receive benefits.

That's OK. Funding for that kind of "woke" stuff is on the chopping block. The program I described was a locally funded non-profit, but it was primarily designed for second language learners. In any case, it's not about nutrition for Gov. Abbot's mind. It's more about lazy poor people who won't work sitting around eating snack foods.

bèlla said:
Many recipients receive extra benefits at farmers markets. Some double WIC coupons and triple the value of SNAP. Most people receiving benefits aren’t working full-time. Cooking shouldn’t be an issue nor making things from scratch. It’s a matter of priorities.

~bella

No, it still requires skills and equipment that many poor people don't have, living in situations that even a rich foodie would balk at cooking in.

bèlla · Monday at 10:59 AM

Laodicean60 said:
Now that my daughter has a family, they are always asking their mom how to cook certain things.

Share this link with her. She makes everything from scratch including snacks for kids and popular items on the shelves like candy and goldfish.

~bella

Laodicean60 · Monday at 11:02 AM

BCP1928 said:
And what if their mom doesn't know? Cooking from scratch requires more than just being forbidden to buy snack foods.

My youngest son, who is 31, is a great cook, and he learned at a young age by watching cooking shows. Since you mentioned English speaking, I assumed migrants, but from my experience, they know how to cook raw foods better than many Americans.

Forbidding to buy of snacks may be a start to educating the public on the ingredients in processed foods.

durangodawood · Monday at 11:04 AM

RDKirk said:
....There is even more to it than time. I remember in my corporate days taking a city bus (the one time in 20 years that I did) between facilities of my company. It put me on a bus besides one of the company cafeteria workers who was heading home. In conversation, she related that with the city's crummy bus service (I already knew it was pretty bad), it took her a two-hour commute to get to work and back. I also knew the area she lived in had been identified as a "food desert," with no grocery store carrying whole foods within an hour's bus ride of her neighborhood. That's a lot of time to take out of a working person's day. If that person is working multiple jobs, it becomes extremely difficult. Carrying groceries on a bus is even more difficult...that would require daily trips to the store just to have bus-manageable loads. And throw in the task of picking up the children at the childcare center into that.

Then, when you've gotten home with those hungry children, do you have a kitchen that makes cooking quick and efficient? Or do you have a one- or two-burner stove with two feet of counter space and four cubic feet of cabinet space? How large is the refrigerator?

A lot of negative factors are stacked up.

People think poor people simply lack willpower (which of course is a "moral deficiency") and thats adequate to explain their situation.

But I am so lucky I never had to contend with these absolute daily hassles of being poor. Who knows how my great and moral willpower would have fared against such a constant grind.

bèlla · Monday at 11:06 AM

BCP1928 said:
It's more about lazy poor people who won't work sitting around eating snack foods.

No one has an excuse for deficiency in the kitchen. There’s a lot of information online with instruction that doesn’t require expensive ingredients. Staples like bread, legumes, vegetables and more.

BCP1928 said:
No, it still requires skills and equipment that many poor people don't have, living in situations that even a rich foodie would balk at cooking in.

You don’t need a lot of tools to cook. I started with a skillet and a sauce pan and a cookbook I got from my grandmother. Poor people around the world have managed with less.

~bella

FireDragon76 · Monday at 11:08 AM

iluvatar5150 said:
From a purely practical standpoint, I think beverages are probably the easiest to filter. Once you get into manufactured, high-carb solid foods, it gets a lot fuzzier. Like, how do you differentiate between a cereal bar, a snack cake, and a muffin?

It's a grey area.

Also, over-policing of what poor people can buy is not respecting their dignity. Poor people aren't things to be managed, they are human beings whose agency needs to be recognized.

bèlla · Monday at 11:13 AM

durangodawood said:
People think poor people simply lack willpower (which of course is a "moral deficiency") and thats adequate to explain their situation.

But I am so lucky I never had to contend with these absolute daily hassles of being poor. Who knows how my great and moral willpower would have fared against such a constant grind.

I don’t think willpower is the culprit. I used to talk a lot of middle class women who were the same. They couldn’t cook and served their husband hamburger helper but had all day to learn and did otherwise. Women spend most of their time on the internet talking when they’re home and post throughout the day when they work. That’s why he doesn’t get meals from scratch. Look at Instagram and Tik-Tok and you’ll see the truth.

~bella

iluvatar5150 · Monday at 11:20 AM

bèlla said:
You don’t need a lot of tools to cook. I started with a skillet and a sauce pan and a cookbook I got from my grandmother. Poor people around the world have managed with less.

~bella

You didn't start with only "a skillet and a sauce pan". You also started with a reliable heat source, a place to store and refrigerate your ingredients, (as noted) a way to transport them, and at least a knife or two to cut them.

That may not be a ton, but it's not nothing. The transportation in particular can be huge. The cheapest cuts of protein where I shop are family packs of chicken breasts, pork loin, and pork shoulder, all of which are around $2.50-3/lb (unfrozen). How are you going to manage a 4 lb pack of raw chicken breasts when you have a 2 hour bus ride home? You have to throw them in the trash as soon as you get home. Depending on how it's packaged, the pork might withstand the trip better, but you'd still better cook it that day.

FireDragon76 said:
Poor people aren't things to be managed, they are human beings whose agency needs to be recognized.

Sounds woke to me.

Desk trauma · Monday at 11:32 AM

bèlla said:
Junk foods should be banned and home made meals should be prioritized.

Define junk food.

RDKirk · Monday at 11:35 AM

iluvatar5150 said:
That may not be a ton, but it's not nothing. The transportation in particular can be huge. The cheapest cuts of protein where I shop are family packs of chicken breasts, pork loin, and pork shoulder, all of which are around $2.50-3/lb (unfrozen). How are you going to manage a 4 lb pack of raw chicken breasts when you have a 2 hour bus ride home? You have to throw them in the trash as soon as you get home. Depending on how it's packaged, the pork might withstand the trip better, but you'd still better cook it that day.

I eat a lot of protein to maintain my diet. My wife is a good cook and an excellent shopper, and we've got a car and some good nearby sources of food (yeah, even Whole Foods).

But protein is still expensive. She's got a source of cheap meat that near expiration, and she knows how to select it...sometimes she'll bring home a major beef haul. But when she gets it home, yeah, all of it has got to be cooked that evening. If we were a poor family with a cook having to do that same all the time, it becomes difficult every day.

Laodicean60 · Monday at 11:37 AM

iluvatar5150 said:
How are you going to manage a 4 lb pack of raw chicken breasts when you have a 2 hour bus ride home?

You must be in a rural setting because I grew up in Houston, and there was never a 2-hour anything except going to work and coming home from work. Grocery is everywhere.

You mean frozen foods won't spoil either? I guess they'll have to buy the Hamburger Helper without the hamburger.

FireDragon76 · Monday at 11:39 AM

iluvatar5150 said:
You didn't start with only "a skillet and a sauce pan". You also started with a reliable heat source, a place to store and refrigerate your ingredients, (as noted) a way to transport them, and at least a knife or two to cut them.

That may not be a ton, but it's not nothing. The transportation in particular can be huge. The cheapest cuts of protein where I shop are family packs of chicken breasts, pork loin, and pork shoulder, all of which are around $2.50-3/lb (unfrozen). How are you going to manage a 4 lb pack of raw chicken breasts when you have a 2 hour bus ride home? You have to throw them in the trash as soon as you get home. Depending on how it's packaged, the pork might withstand the trip better, but you'd still better cook it that day.

Sounds woke to me.

It's not really woke, it's just being intelligent. I'm pretty much done with arguing politics. If people don't like what I have to say... remember that Gen X thing? "Whatever". Sometimes that intuition is the best advice. As Jesus said, you shake the dust off your feet and move on. Stupidity and foolishness are their own punishment.

RDKirk · Monday at 11:40 AM

Laodicean60 said:
You must be in a rural setting because I grew up in Houston, and there was never a 2-hour anything except going to work and coming home from work. Grocery is everywhere.

Your experience is limited.

Food Deserts in Houston – Food Deserts

NBC: Gov. Abbott asks USDA to approve waiver banning junk food purchases with SNAP benefits

Ezekiel 3:3 ("Change")

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