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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.

Careful, they'll ban that next

yeah but he's doing it for poor people so it's ok because fuck poor people

Hitler was a bit of a health nut too, lots of anti smoking laws.

They also don't buy diapers, as per Marshall Mathers (2002).

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.

It's simple, just pay FDOGE(formerly the FDA) $100/mo and you can put a special blue checkmark on your food packaging to signify its not junk food.

As it applies only to food stamps, I guess that's the goal.

They'll fight those "welfare queens" (blegh) in court in order to not have to guarantee a minimum of survival.

Pasteurization is considered processing.

How is he going to define this?

Bahahha, they don't care about logical consistency. They are going to ban anything they think is "bad" and allow everything else. Trying to nail them down is like trying to staple jello -- there's no logical approach. Trump and Co. take flying by the seat of your pants to a new art form.

You can't get them on "gotchas" like this because they simply DO NOT CARE.

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.

Ezekiel 16:49

Yeah. That's their whole aim. Make sure more people are a poor as possible and as beaten down as possible. These are the same politicians that don't want Walmart to pay their workers enough money to get off food stamps.

This is just a pretext to reduce food stamp payments. Conservatives have used this rhetoric since the 90s to attack food stamp payments. “Welfare queens are buying STEAK with your tax dollars!”

And the overwhelming majority of antidepressants are prescribed on a voluntary basis, eg the people taking them are choosing to do so because they feel there is not a more viable option for them. There is a whole essay on why this is the case but just some key points: therapy is really expensive (often a therapist costs almost as much as a psychiatrist except it’s a weekly visit instead of monthly), effective therapy requires a lot of active buy in and effort that people often don’t have the bandwidth required to contribute due to external factors like oppressive work or family life, therapy requires a time investment, stigma, etc. essentially overprescribing is a side effect of massive systemic issues

So do you address any of these systemic issues? Do you address any of the issues related to the western diet being loaded with sugar and other carbs, that we have huge swaths of residential areas with no proper grocery stores around throughout a great deal of the US, or that our environments are so structured around cars that we walk like 50 feet a week, etc?

Nah, just create more financial stress for poor people who eat like all of us (eg, like shit). Punitive approach 100% of the time!

How about increasing the amount of ebt funds for people who do not buy an excessive amount of empty calorie food and drink? Create a base amount of funds that everyone gets and increase the amount by 2.5% for every 25% of funds used that are dedicated to “healthy foods”. So if you buy only “healthy foods” you get an extra 10% of your ebt allotment, and if you buy nothing but junk then you aren’t penalized (unless of course you count not getting the reward, I guess). But this isn’t punitive so americans hate it

Or maybe make regulations that any grocery store that opens more that 20 stores is required to maintain at least 1 store per 20 in an underserved area that will not be profitable. Adjust the regulation actively of course so that whole foods doesn’t just become 800 separate stores to circumvent the regulation or whatever. But this means that corporations have to do something to enrich communities at the expense of constant profits so americans hate it

Or any of the obvious shit people have gone on about for ages. Nationalized health care, shorter work weeks with improved wages, workers getting equitable shares of companies, robust pensions, unions, etc. but americans are brain washed to think this is commie bullshit

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...

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.

There's a percentage juice and ingredient requirements to not be in the "junk" category.