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Don't Tell Poor People What Foods To Buy

 Commentary: For a few years, I worked at an organization providing services to youth in south Los Angeles. While our programs in sports and the arts attracted the most attention, one of our most consequential programs was nutritional education. Many of the families we served relied on packaged foods to feed themselves, which is expensive and less nutritious, as packaged foods are often loaded with additives, salt, and corn syrup. Buying staples for cooking is cheaper than packaged foods when you know what to do with them. As they learned more about food and cooking, they tended to make choices that improved their health and their budgets.

 

The broader context here is the transformation of the American diet in the interest of corporate profit, which has fattened up the industrial world on commodity food products high in fat, sugar, and salt, and heavily reliant on meat. At the same time, non-white and impoverished neighborhoods have fewer supermarkets than white neighborhoods, and in rural or impoverished areas your local market might be a convenience store stocked with junk food. This food system, both in production and distribution, is bad for everybody, but the harsher impact falls on the poor and working classes.

 

Our approach in Los Angeles was humanitarian: provide good information and advice, and allow people the agency to make choices accordingly. Education does not, of course, guarantee the best choices, nor should it constrain a person from an occasional treat, whether they are poor or not.

 

Another approach is authoritarian and punitive. While some view the poor as worthy human beings subjugated by a punitive socio-economic system, others view them as undesirable and wayward freeloaders who need to be policed and humiliated in exchange for assistance. Unsurprisingly, the latter category tends to be less concerned about the conditions that maintain poverty.

 

For New Mexico's current legislative session, Senator Cliff Pirtle of Roswell has filed his second attempt to restrict what those receiving federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) may purchase with their benefits. Senate Bill 5 would direct the Secretary of Human Services to seek a federal waiver allowing New Mexico to restrict SNAP purchases to the range of foods that qualify under the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program - a much stricter range, because WIC was created as a supplement to the SNAP program.

 

A humanitarian approach might be to support local organizations and extend the USDA's "SNAP-ed" approach, promoting good information about nutrition, cooking, and exercise. The USDA has also instituted new rules to expand healthy selections at stores authorized to accept SNAP payments. Statewide, we might look at ways to help local businesses come into compliance with the new rules for their own benefit and for consumers receiving SNAP assistance, especially in areas that are already underserved. We can remind our fiscally conservative lawmakers about supply and demand, and show them the data: a dollar of SNAP funds stimulates almost twice its value in economic activity. That means jobs. It might not be the preferred vehicle of economic stimulus, but if we must tolerate the dissonance of the "richest country in the world" allowing so many of its people to go hungry, we can at least acknowledge that this program is a crucial prop to our economy and a moral necessity.

 

Pirtle's bill does not deserve a second hearing. While the stated end of promoting a healthier diet among the poor is laudable, his means are harsh and economically unsound. Let us lift up our people instead.

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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the "Desert Sage" column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Write to him at DesertSageMail@gmail.com.