It’s heartbreaking, but not surprising. When you’re dealing with limited resources, constant stress, and often living in areas where healthy options are harder to access or more expensive, sugary drinks can feel like an affordable comfort. Instead of judging SNAP recipients, we should be looking at the systems that make soda more accessible than clean, appealing
, and fresh food.
> I judge them the same way I judge anyone that drinks that crap: harshly. Don't tell others they shouldn't judge people for their misdeeds.
Good job ignoring absolutely everything in the comment except the part that offended you. Nothing more American than having a hard-on for being judgemental and then defending the right instead of actually trying to solve the underlying problem.
Are SNAP recipients not allowed to enjoy a soda at all? I really don't understand the problem with this. Society acts like signing up for SNAP involves signing a contract to lose 100 pounds and only eat iceberg lettuce or something.
Americans seem to love to gatekeep what the poor are allowed to have or not have.
They have this image of the Welfare Queen driving a pink Cadillac to cash her welfare checks at the liquor store.
It seems that no matter how desperately destitute someone might be,
there's a person who will point at something they have,
whether it's a tent to sleep in under a bridge (a gift from an organization providing assistance to the houseless),
a bicycle that's their only means of transportation,
or a garden planted on public property,
and say "they can't be that poor if they have that!
When someone lives off of public benefit, there's a sense in which the public can have an interest in how the money is used -- its use should correlate with its intent.
That's why SNAP money is restricted to particular categories. So caring about how it's spent is already a foregone conclusion, and rightly so.
If someone wants to spend money however they like, they'll have to earn it themselves. Even inherited money carries a sense of obligation to honor the family with how it's used (like not blowing it all in a week of lavish partying in Vegas, as an extreme example).
If an individual spends 10% of their SNAP benefits on soda, they’ve spent about ~$30 over a month on it, which is ten 20fl oz drinks. People drinking a bit more than a gallon of soda per month only supports the notion that they can subsist on that without any water if you believe that they categorically have some sort of exceptional unhuman biology.
Well, it's true that water has zero calories and is neutral tasting. It's not filling to any degree, and milk will give you a lot more of what your body needs.
Water is great for hydration without filling you otherwise. Like, say you need to drink a lot of fluid because you are really active, you would probably get sick of milk pretty quickly.
But anyway, in most cases, the fact that drinking milk doubles as a source of food is clearly a benefit. It's hard to explain a common behavior by reference to a rare circumstance.
The idea of sports drinks is that you can drink them without getting water poisoning. This is only a concern if you need a lot of water because you've been sweating a lot, but I thought that was the scenario you were pointing to.
