So, food stamps are an agricultural subsidy. The reason they can buy junk food in the first place is because this is a hand out to corn syrup producers.
Good fucking luck taking on big ag with this idea, RFK Jr.
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
358 points (100.0% liked)
196
52 readers
90 users here now
Community Rules
You must post before you leave
Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very "off topic".
Bigotry is not allowed, this includes (but is not limited to): Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, Sexism, Abelism, Classism, or discrimination based on things like Ethnicity, Nationality, Language, or Religion.
Avoid shilling for corporations, posting advertisements, or promoting exploitation of workers.
Proselytization, support, or defense of authoritarianism is not welcome. This includes but is not limited to: imperialism, nationalism, genocide denial, ethnic or racial supremacy, fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc.
Avoid AI generated content.
Avoid misinformation.
Avoid incomprehensible posts.
No threats or personal attacks.
No spam.
Moderator Guidelines
Moderator Guidelines
- Don’t be mean to users. Be gentle or neutral.
- Most moderator actions which have a modlog message should include your username.
- When in doubt about whether or not a user is problematic, send them a DM.
- Don’t waste time debating/arguing with problematic users.
- Assume the best, but don’t tolerate sealioning/just asking questions/concern trolling.
- Ask another mod to take over cases you struggle with, if you get tired, or when things get personal.
- Ask the other mods for advice when things get complicated.
- Share everything you do in the mod matrix, both so several mods aren't unknowingly handling the same issues, but also so you can receive feedback on what you intend to do.
- Don't rush mod actions. If a case doesn't need to be handled right away, consider taking a short break before getting to it. This is to say, cool down and make room for feedback.
- Don’t perform too much moderation in the comments, except if you want a verdict to be public or to ask people to dial a convo down/stop. Single comment warnings are okay.
- Send users concise DMs about verdicts about them, such as bans etc, except in cases where it is clear we don’t want them at all, such as obvious transphobes. No need to notify someone they haven’t been banned of course.
- Explain to a user why their behavior is problematic and how it is distressing others rather than engage with whatever they are saying. Ask them to avoid this in the future and send them packing if they do not comply.
- First warn users, then temp ban them, then finally perma ban them when they break the rules or act inappropriately. Skip steps if necessary.
- Use neutral statements like “this statement can be considered transphobic” rather than “you are being transphobic”.
- No large decisions or actions without community input (polls or meta posts f.ex.).
- Large internal decisions (such as ousting a mod) might require a vote, needing more than 50% of the votes to pass. Also consider asking the community for feedback.
- Remember you are a voluntary moderator. You don’t get paid. Take a break when you need one. Perhaps ask another moderator to step in if necessary.
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
My understanding is that this move can only be appropriately considered through the lens of the aesthetics of maintaining an effective culture war.
Like the racially charged tirades against “welfare queens” of the past, this pretends to deal with income inequality on a level that blames the victim only, while doing nothing for the systemic factors that create and maintain junk food dependency.
It’s like a school or church entity attempting to deal with widespread sexual abuse by making and enforcing dress codes on potential victims.
It’s funny cause the US school lunch program is garbage food
Careful, they'll ban that next
This will do literally fucking nothing because food stamps don't cover grocery bills for anybody. You always have to subsidize it.
They also don't buy diapers, as per Marshall Mathers (2002).
It’s easy to talk about how people on food stamps should just cook healthy meals… when you have a house, with a kitchen, and a fridge, and aren’t working 3 jobs, and don’t have kids that are bombarded with ads for sugar coated sugar ……………………..
It’s just another way to punish the poor.
No one can possibly have food sensitivities or allergies to common and cheap ingredients. Everyone is able to cook everything from scratch. Disability is just mind over matter. You just have to MAKE time and prioritize. You need to work more than one job? MAKE the time. Just sleep less. Not feeling well because of that? Well, I struggled too (in college, where I didn't have many responsibilities and there was also an end date) so you can do it!
You just have to want it.
Signed, someone that was given all the speeches when I asked for help because I was broke and occasionally homeless. Makes you not want to ask for help any more.
Besides, a person of food stamps could be eating a healthy diet, but still simply want a treat once in a while without destroying their finances, because, it turns out, the poors sometimes want to enjoy things.
This is exactly it. People are outraged imagining that other people on food stamps are out eating lobster dinners every night and they cheer on the idea of adding all sorts of restrictions on what people are allowed to buy. It's dehumanizing and it doesn't actually solve any problems, it just creates new ones. Now people are at the store trying to figure out what they can afford because spaghetti is covered but spaghetti sauce is not and no one has time to make a fresh spaghetti sauce from scratch after working two jobs but some fuck thought it was funny to stick it to the poors and pass a bunch of complicated restrictions that make it a pain in the ass for everyone.
parasites are mostly protien and reproductive organs. if you ever dissected a parasitic worms you will be able to see it has dozens of uteri or male gonads.
Why isn't our low-protein gruel wearing down his resistance?
Least bad news from America in a week. Though if the junk food isn’t replaced with equal calories from healthy veggies, for the same amount of stamps, or however that works, it would be evil
if the junk food isn’t replaced with equal calories from healthy veggies, for the same amount of stamps
It won't be. This just ignores the fact that one of the reasons junk food is popular is because it's cheaper than ready-to-eat healthy food.
The actual problem: Many parts of America are food deserts where people do not have access to affordable nutritious food. This problem is exacerbated for those below the poverty line who may not have access to a vehicle.
But solving that problem is hard so it's just way easier to make sure that poor people aren't allowed to buy the food that is accessible to them. Making desperate people even more desperate... I'm sure that wont have any unintended consequences.
Well, I have dozens of healthy food programs ideas but I guess shortage of ideas isn’t the problem.
From my experiences with junk food diet, you feel extremely bad on it and when you are in hard situation you probably need to be in prime brain fitness without junk food brain fog. Prolonged junk food feels like intoxication almost.
So I think providing such vitamins and micro-elements for cheap/free should be very important to overall strategy of pulling people out of poverty.
If such were provided then discontinuing junk food support would be a next logical step.
load more comments
(1 replies)
But of course many much smarter people figured it all out ages ago already. What ‘~~left~~’ solid folks fail at is they don’t immediately understand that empathy and good plan isn’t enough but you need marketing.
In their honesty they often fail to see the appeal of the shallow and the allure of the superficial. All the skills alt right excels at.
They do not easily see or aren’t willing to, that you often need to trick or even lie or manipulate people to be in the position to do good things and/or to do them effectively on a big scale.
The alt right rise is nothing else but a failure to sell a solution to the future obstacles. People aren’t fundamentally racist, stuck up or bigoted. They just buy the only thing that is left on the barren political market. The one that gives them hope. Even if it is only a cheap trick of some ‘patriotic’ demagogue.
There was once a time, very brief, when Elon Musk wasn’t a complete jackass. A brief time when people were watching rocket starts with awe that instilled hope in them. Hope in the vision of the better future. If we could rally people around this idea, that the future of humanity is bright, tolerant and abundant, that we can become something noble and beautiful, then that I believe would be a uniting force we need. Challenges, sure but worth solving because of what we can become if we succeed.
Climate scientists do not understand the reaction of average person when they tell them “We must lower our CO2 footprint”. The response is Why? It isn’t a question about what will happen but the question of motivation. People ask “What is the reward of solving it, what will I have from it?”. Of course scientists are pissed at such questions and throw a snarky answer.
What will an average person have from fighting climate change? You will have future of thriving great nature and an abundance of basic goods provided by it. You will experience unity that was achieved by solving great problems together. You will have plethora of technological wonders that come from focused collaboration of human beings. You will have a victory, not merely containment of defeat.
We won’t make America great again. We will make America greater than it ever was before.
People aren’t fundamentally racist, stuck up or bigoted.
Yes, at least some of them are. Don't be this naive. You could make the argument even that most of MAGA are EcOnOmiCalLy AnXIoUs but (trigger warning: Godwin's Law) so were most nazis. SOME people really are like that.
There was once a time, very brief, when Elon Musk wasn’t a complete jackass. A brief time when people were watching rocket starts with awe that instilled hope in them.
That was called marketing and it sold a lot of Teslas. No one who will do a nazi salute is capable of delivering the utopia future you describe. Anyone who would do a nazi salute is definitively always a jackass.
Otherwise I agree and really do appreciate this kind of hopefulness. I really think what you're saying is correct and important. It's just, well, those two SLIGHT bits of contention... Sorry.
Much as I hate Scott Adams now, there was a time when he wasn't a complete jackass.
"And the poor shall not be allowed even the pleasure of sugary treats. Yea, they shall have their food stamps slashed for the sin of poverty."
Book of Jebus, chapter 6, verses 3 and 4.
Seriously, though, it seems like everything these people do is just to inflict more suffering.
I’m sure this is the push they need to get that six figure job that they have avoided to do because they are lazy
load more comments
(1 replies)
I mean, if they'd also improve the ability to get healthy food with those stamps it's not necessarily bad. But judging by who's saying it I somehow doubt that it's done with good intentions.
How do those food stamps work anyways? Can you use them like money? I'm not American so it's a foreign concept yo me.
How do those food stamps work anyways? Can you use them like money? I’m not American so it’s a foreign concept yo me.
You get an EBT debit card with an amount of money based on some calculations that can only be spent on certain things (in the case of SNAP aka food stamps, you can only spend that balance on food). WIC is another subsidized food program that sometimes gets included when talking about "food stamps" targeting people with small children, which has a more restrictive list on what you can buy with it.
Some of the guidelines have been painfully dumb, even if there was an intended logic to them - like "no hot food" where the goal was to disallow restaurant purchases and purchasing pre-cooked meals because they are generally a less efficient use of the funds, but led to dumb shit like Subway noting that they sell subs cold and so could hypothetically still sell, then just offer to toast the sub post-sale so that the division was meaningless.
Then you have the abuses of the program that really do need fixed, like stores that are well known to be willing to buy certain stock from just anyone, at a stupidly low price. The idea being that you go to Walmart or wherever and buy up a bunch of product that you can buy on SNAP, take it to the store and resell it at a massive loss to launder your SNAP funds into regular cash. In my area it was certain convenience stores that were known to buy certain brands of soda in cases of cans for much less than they could be bought through legitimate channels as a way of laundering SNAP funds.
Given how many Americans are in food deserts where it's close to impossible to get anything but junk food, it's definitely an absolutely moronic move.
First you have to make sure that fresh and healthy food is available for everyone then you make this kind of move.
Not the other way around...
If you want to know the quality of US education before current cuts...
I learned about food deserts in 7th grade. The teacher called it food desserts and went into great detail about how it meant places where you can only find desserts to eat like ice cream shops. It's a real problem for these areas because they don't have real food to eat and everyone is obese from only eating desserts.
People really just don't understand how fucked the U.S education system is. The idiots all had kids, and some of those kids became teachers, who continue to pass down their culture of ignorance. Meanwhile, teaching is such a dogshit job that nobody in the U.S. wants to do it, so hiring standards have gotten lower and lower.
It's like a perfect storm taking us to a situation where people at a 7th grade reading level are teaching U.S. History to 10th graders.
/fellating_pikachu_meme
Good lord. How in the hell does that thinking even survive a first pass at thinking about how a fru-fru place like an ice cream shop could survive while the people living there wouldn't be able to get to a place with 'real food' on offer?
The implication was more we were supposed to be judging them for being fat and only wanting to eat desserts, ruining the options for everyone else. Free market giving them what they want.
This kind of thing is how millions of people can think they are well informed and the blame is on some other demographic. While not knowing anything about the subject.
Yeah agreed. It's always insane to me to hear how all that works in the US. Here I've always had a supermarket at <10 min by bike, and those always have fresh fruit and vegetables. A society where unhealthy food is way easier and cheaper to get is a recipe for disaster
I'm somebody who has food stamps. It's like a debit card that the government will load with money monthly. You can only use it to purchase food items. If your total bill at the store is $40, $20 of food and $20 of other household goods, then paying with the food stamps card will pay for the $20 of food. You'll still have to pay the $20 of other goods with your own money.
This isn't going to help anyone eat healthier, just make poor people more miserable.
So no fruit juice?
Well, they definitely could get worms for all I care.