Author: Carrie Kirby / Source: Wise Bread
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, has always been controversial. It’s meant to help ensure that everyone gets enough to eat, and the program assures applicants that they have the right to be treated with “dignity, consideration, and respect.
” Yet, the program also imposes lots of complicated rules on users, and many people have shared opinions about whether users are making “acceptable” choices with their SNAP dollars.Recently, SNAP has been in the news — and in the middle of countless social media debates — because of three developments.
First, Amazon opened its first automated grocery store, Amazon Go, where you can simply scan items with your smartphone, take them, and leave without checking out, but it doesn’t accept SNAP.
Second, a petition has been circulating advocating that SNAP benefits should cover food for pets as well as human household members.
And third, the Trump administration Office of Management and budget director, Mick Mulvaney, proposed replacing food aid to low-income families with a “Blue Apron-style” box of canned goods and other non-perishables.
Which made us wonder what you can currently buy with SNAP, and what you can’t.
What you can buy with SNAP
SNAP and its beneficiaries have plenty of critics, often people who feel that low-income individuals should be limited in what they are allowed to purchase with public funds. Critics of those critics would say that prescribing their shopping lists is intrusive. Generally, the rules limit SNAP purchases to food products, with some limitations and exceptions.
Energy drinks
Energy drinks such as Red Bull have been available for purchase with food stamps since 2013, when companies making them began changing their labels to list “nutrition facts” instead of “supplement facts.” Critics have tried to have them removed from eligibility, but as long as they are classified as a food item, they are likely to stay.
Luxury items
Since they are clearly food items, you can, in theory, buy steak, lobster, shrimp, or any other high-end food with food stamps. Legislators have proposed removing such items from the program, but in reality there is no need: Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that people in the income group low enough to qualify for SNAP hardly buy any beef or seafood (only about 10 percent of the average monthly grocery bill), because it’s too expensive.
Junk food
There is some truth to the impression that a lot of SNAP recipients buy junk food. A 2011 USDA analysis found that 23 cents of every SNAP dollar goes to sweetened beverages, desserts, salty snacks, candy, and sugar. (The other 77 cents goes toward meal ingredients, such as milk, bread, meat, cereal, and vegetables.) However, non-SNAP households spent 20 cents of every dollar on those same sweet treats. So shopping habits were similar, regardless of payment method.
Nutritionists have expressed concern about the amount of junk food purchases funded by SNAP, which is meant to improve health, not to contribute to health problems such as obesity. But attempts to cut junk food from SNAP run into problems both with complexity and with the discomfort of making the government the judge of which foods are worthy and which…
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