When my sons were small, I noticed that their appetites for soft drinks expanded to match the amount of soda that was in the house. Stocking up during a sale was counterproductive; as long as there was a can of Coke in the house, they wanted Coke.
I had noticed this curious phenomenon before when it came to my appetite for ice cream, which is why I don’t routinely keep ice cream in the freezer. I adopted the same policy on soft drinks: I bought them only as an occasional treat. My boys drank milk and water and Crystal Light, and now they are adults who seem unwarped by such a deprived childhood.
I bring up this topic in part because the Arkansas Legislature is considering asking the federal government for permission to restrict purchases of junk food using benefits from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps. But mainly it’s because I read an article in The New York Times about a new U.S. Department of Agriculture study that revealed that SNAP households spent more than 9 percent of their grocery dollars on “sweetened beverages,” which are mainly sodas (5 percent) but also fruit juices, energy drinks and sweetened teas.
Sweetened beverages, in fact were the No. 2 expense category for SNAP shoppers, behind the protein category of “meat, poultry and seafood.” But while meats were No. 1 for all purchases, non-SNAP families spent less on meats and sweet beverages and more on vegetables, cheeses and fruits than SNAP shoppers.
The rest of us still buy a whole lot of sweetened beverages — 7.1 percent of the non-SNAP expenditures, with 4 percent spent just on sodas. “This report raises a question for all households: Are we consuming too many sweetened beverages, period?” Kevin Concannon, the USDA undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services, said in an interview with the Times.
The USDA report concluded that the “food purchases, consumption patterns, and dietary outcomes among SNAP participants and higher income households are more similar than different,” and it’s hard to argue with that. Low-income Americans aren’t extraterrestrials, and the report didn’t compare their purchases with wealthy households but with all non-SNAP buyers.
But the USDA seemed to be soft-pedaling the soft drink purchases, characterizing the 5 percent that SNAP households spent on soft drinks as “somewhat more” than the 4 percent spent by non-SNAP households, when basic math tells us that it’s actually 25 percent more of a nutrition-free product.
The article so surprised and fascinated me that I posted it on Facebook with this comment: “I have mixed feelings about efforts to micromanage what poor people are allowed to eat, but if nearly 10 percent of SNAP benefits are paying for completely nonessential soft drinks, it seems easy and reasonable just to make that category ineligible.” I wasn’t as precise as I should have been — it’s 9.3 percent of grocery dollars spent by SNAP households, which often includes some of their own money, and the category includes all sweetened beverages, not just soft drinks. Lordamercy, some of my friends seemed to think I was suggesting punishing the poor.
“Ah, Gwen, your inner conservative is showing,” one friend said, as if that were a bad thing. I was told that exempting soft drinks from SNAP would be “like kicking people when they’re down,” and, most astonishing, “They need calories cheap. Let them have their soda.”
Dear Soft Drink Lobby: You have some powerful liberal allies out there.
But others, both liberal and conservative, agreed with me that taxpayers should not be paying for sodas in a country overwhelmed with obesity and diabetes. (I don’t have the energy to fight about juices.)
I do not resent SNAP beneficiaries. I do not want to punish them. I’m sure there are a lot of other foods that they, and the rest of us, would be better off without. But there is no category of empty calories that consumes so much of SNAP households’ grocery budget as soft drinks, and for all the shaming I took on Facebook, I couldn’t shake the conclusion that it would be an easy and reasonable category to exempt from SNAP. Almost any other food purchase would have more nutritional value.
And that was before it was pointed out to me that in his bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy,” author J.D. Vance described his stint as a grocery store clerk, where he observed food stamp recipients buying soft drinks in order to resell them at a discount. Laundering them for cash, as it were.
As soon as our younger son left for college, nearly a gallon of milk went sour in the refrigerator. That’s when a friend gave me this great tip I’ll share with you: Organic milk is more expensive, but it lasts much longer.
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Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com. |