"Over all, the report found, SNAP households spent about 40 cents of every dollar at the grocery store on “basic items” like meat, fruits, vegetables, milk, eggs and bread. Another 40 cents of every dollar was spent on “cereal, prepared foods, dairy products, rice and beans.” Lastly, 20 cents of each dollar was spent on a broad category of junk foods that included “sweetened beverages, desserts, salty snacks, candy and sugar.”
SNAP households spent 9.3 percent of their grocery budgets on soft drinks alone. That was slightly higher than the 7.1 percent figure for households that do not receive food stamps."
I do agree that it is unfair to single out food stamp recipients for their soft drink consumption. And other types of junk food may not be any better. But the idea of spending ~10% of already very limited grocery budget on soft drinks blows my mind. Of course this “news” is not surprising, but it makes me very sad.
I think I might spend 20% of my budget on snack foods as well. We get ice cream, crackers, cookies, pita chips, sugar, brown sugar (we bake here sometimes). We even buy the occasional candy bar.
Most juices have just as much sugar in them as soda. It’s not a healthier option.
Americans are addicted to sugar-the average american consumes over 100 lbs of refined sugars per year. You should be eating no more than 4 lbs. This means sugar you add to your coffee, sodas sweetened with sugar, etc.
Try going without sugar or sweeteners (and don’t get me started on how bad THOSE are) for one week and you’ll see just how addicted to sugar you are.
There are several reasons for this. For one, in low income neighborhoods the kind of stores you see there often have very little in the way of health beverages, in part because the sugary drinks are a lot cheaper than healthy ones (I am leaving out bottled water) thanks to the subsidies they enjoy. The other reason is consuming soda and such, because of the sugar, is replacement calories for what should be consumed in food, basically it is a cheap way to stave off hunger. My biggest concern is the 40 cents spent on prepared foods, as much as the junk food, and the reason so much is spent there is because that kind of food is cheap, the canned food, packaged food, and the like because of government subsidized cheap beef, cheese and especially high fructose corn syrup makes crap food among the cheapest you can get. Go to a dollar store sometime and see what kind of food items they have, and you get an idea of the problem.
This isn’t all just government policy, there isn’t just one factor. Some of it is the places where low income people live simply have few places to shop and often they are things like dollar stores or bodegas (to use a NYC term). Too, often there is little knowledge of healthy eating habits or how to stretch dollars to eat healthy, and that may be tied to things like the breakdown in families, intergenerational poverty and the like. In NYC there have been all kinds of initiatives to get information to low income residents about healthy eating, but as far as I know it hasn’t helped much. The gentification NYC has undergone hasn’t helped much, I was reading about how poor residents of East Harlem, that these days because of gentrification has things like whole foods or regular supermarkets, end up traveling a long distance to find places they can afford, that the new supermarkets and such are all upscale.
This is why I get furious when they introduce soda tax. Grand standing at the expense of the poor, we are taxing it since it’s not good for your health. Soft drinks and cigarette smoke may be cheapest entertainment available to them. Not sure how much “healthy” life style benefits them when odds are stacked against them. How many of them die of sweet drinks compared to of violence?
I wonder how much of the discrepancy in %s on soda consumption relate to how the beverage is purchased versus how much is actually consumed.
For us, it is extremely easy to pick up a 35 pack of coke from Costco for about $10. Barriers to this type of purchase would be transportation to get to a Costco (or similar warehouse store), money to pay for the yearly membership to the store, transportation to get a 35 pack of coke back to a home, and storage at said home to hold that much soda. Per can of soda, my cost is very very cheap, about 29 cents per can.
Contrast that with having to buy soda in a 12 pack from the local grocery store (usually about $6 unless on sale around here). All of a sudden - the cost for an equivalent amount of soda is $18, and getting said three 12 packs home still can have the same issues as the warehouse store. So, best case scenario, you are maybe buying one 12 pack at a time, at a per can cost of 50 cents per can.
Now let’s assume you decide to just buy 1 soda at a time, because your budget is extremely limited and you can’t spend between $10 - $18 all at once to buy your soda at the cheapest cost.
Each can at a bodega, 7/11or equivalent store is at least 99 cents. All of a sudden, it is $35 for the equivalent amount of product. And if you are choosing to buy a 16 or 20 oz bottle (so you can re-close it) you are looking at about $1.75 per can.
Being poor is one of the most expensive experiences you can ever face. So, I cannot and will not ever begrudge someone getting a relatively small amount of pleasure by buying a soda or a candy bar or a bag of chips.
I don’t buy this. The poor in the US are more likely to be obese than to be starving. Even if they were trying to stave off hunger, calories from grains are dirt cheap.
The poor can be obese and starving, especially the poor kids. These are flipsides of the same coin. There are several aspects of this problem, including nutritional, economical, cultural and educational, and all of them are interconnected. No one is begrudging, but simply saying that the poor should suffer from poor health/nutritions because they also suffer from crime is false dichotomy.
@roethlisburger:
The reason the poor are obese is precisely because certain types of calories from grain are cheap, not to mention the cheap meat that is a staple of fast food and processed goods. The bread that the poor buy, the white bread and the like you find in dollar stores and bodegas, not only has benefit from the heavily subsidized grains, but is loaded with HFC which is dirty cheap and processed food people use it in bread and other products liberally as a filler. The cereals you find in low income neighborhoods are loaded with sugar as well. The irony is that unlike the poor in a third world country, the poor in our country are not the image you see of emaciated people, but rather are obese because the kind of food they can get and afford is full of empty calories, rather than quality ones. Among other things, one of the things they have finally figured out is that a diet heavy in grain based carbs, especially the white flour that is the basis for most of the things the poor would be eating, is not healthy for you, the whole grain based diet the FDA has been pushing for years is more politics than science, like the heavy subsidies on corn in particular has lead to cheap, crappy food.
I think a lot of you have hit the true issue. If you read your local circular, a 2liter bottle of soda of some sort is always 99 cents. Chips are always 2/$4 or so.
Milk (at least by me) is $4 a gallon. For $4, you’d get maybe 4 apples…
Plus folks on SNAP are more likely not to have appropriate facilities to store and cook food. Some just need to buy food daily. Maybe groceries and bodegas should look at that and fill a niche need?
That is not only crazy, but insanely perjorative. Oh look at those stupid poor people, let them have their soda and smokes.
No.
Water is free, and so is going for a walk. I don’t buy the whole “let them have this fun since they have so little” baloney at all. Good health habits do not have to be expensive.
Many grains end up being empty calories because people use so much sugar to make them palatable. And sugar is just a vicious cycle. When people say sugar is more addicting than meth, I sort of believe them. As someone said upthread, try going without refined sugar for a week to see how hard it is. It is in everything. The only way to eat around it (healthily) is to have access to good grocery stores with good, fresh produce and lean meats (which are going to cost more than meats with more fat in them). Those who think fruit juices are better, well, nutritionists will tell you that you’re really deceiving yourself if you believe that. You really need to eat the whole fruit to get the full benefits, and it’s much more expensive to purchase fresh fruit, than it is to buy a concentrated can of orange juice and mix it with water. So, more empty calories that do little to advance nutritional needs.
About a year ago, it was announced that Whole Foods was going to make a foray into poor neighborhoods with an experimental model. One was supposed to be on the south side of Chicago. I don’t really go out of my way to read the news, so I’m not sure if it ever opened, or if it did, how it’s doing. I hope it’s doing well so more of them will open in neighborhoods that really need it. Not only were they opening a unique-concept store, they were going to offer free cooking classes to teach people how to cook with healthy foods. I admire them for that.
Well, if you take into consideration the diseases that could be better controlled with proper nutrition, such as diabetes and heart disease, I’m sure more die of poor nutrition than violence. Yes, I realize we’re talking about something more than sweet drinks, but let’s be real, people who are using soft drinks to that extent likely are not getting good nutrition all around. I can’t think if anyone I know who is really engaged in healthy eating, who keeps soft drinks in the house for regular consumption. And if they do, they know it’s not good for them, and make the decision anyway, thinking they will counterbalance it with other healthy food choices.
@terriwtt:
Thank you, that is a great post. I have had people point out that in poor neighborhood’s stores they can get ‘fruit juice’, but what they leave out is the apple juice is basically sugar water (they often supplement it with concentrated grape juice), or the orange juice is often ‘orange drink’ with a ton of sugar and no pulp in it. Fruit juice is not healthy (OJ with pulp may be a bit healthier, but it is still a sugar bomb), but people think it is. The meat in poor neighborhoods often can be pretty cheap (I lived in a marginal area of the NE bronx years ago, was surpised at how cheap the meat was in some of the stores, later on I realized why, it was very fatty, meat raised on corn and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones, all subsidized by the government, which was why it was cheap). Worse is that poor people rely mostly on packaged food, which is the real disaster, loaded with sugar and salt and really, really crappy meat and poultry that is lacking omega 3 fatty acid, is lower in vitamins and other nutrients and is basically hollow calories to a large extent).
@teriwtt:
I thought the cheaper Whole Foods was the 360 store, and from what I remember while cheaper than Whole Foods proper, it wasn’t particularly cheap. Was this a totally different kind of store, or the 360 brand? If they are able to bring that to poor, underserved neighborhoods, that is great. I had a laugh the other day, there was a talking head show on local tv in NYC, and they were talking about gentrification and the benefits it brings, and someone pointed out how that now that neighborhoods like East Harlem and Harlem have gentrified, it has brought stores like Whole Foods and Fairway to them, bringing choice…a guest on the panel snorted, and asked them if they ever shopped in either store and saw the prices, and if not, did they ever wonder why people call whole foods “Whole Paycheck”?
The 365 concept stores were developed after they announced and opened the store in Englewood. I’ve been researching this in the last 20 minutes or so. The store in Englewood has opened, but there is a 365 store opening in Evergreen Park.
EBT cannot be used to buy alcohol or cigarettes. Food stamps are supposed to be used so that families can have food. Sugary sodas are not food in my book. They have zero nutritional value.
I’m all for respecting people’s choices even if they are receiving help from government but for their own good and for good of our healthcare system, food stamps should be reserved for food. Junk is not food, nobody needs it no matter how they pay for it.