Food Companies Spend $10 Million to Keep Junk Food Covered by SNAP

[meow2u3]

In South Texas, not far from the Rio Grande, the area known as Little Mexico could easily be mistaken for an impoverished village on the south side of the border. Eli Saslow of the Washington Post describes the slapdash homes, chickens wandering through the streets, a mule munching on trash in the middle of an intersection.

Except, as the immigrant parents of Blanca, a diabetic single mother of two who relies on food stamps, told their daughter about the border, “On one side you’re skinny. On the other you’re fat.”

In his long, impressive story, with its flashy “Snow Fall”–like design, Saslow looks at the problem inherent in modern poverty: Hunger no longer means being skinny for lack of food. Rather, it means subsisting on junk—and suffering from obesity and other diet-related diseases as a result of the new diet of austerity.

http://news.yahoo.com/food-companies-spend-10-million-keep-junk-food-220551522.html

And the teahadists have the temerity to judge and condemn the poor for choosing and eating cheap junk food when in fact the real culprit is the food industry that effectively promotes obesity for the sake of profits.

[gopiscrap]

1. that's fucked up

[duffyduff]

2. Keep up the shaming of the poor by claiming they are "fat" and "eat junk food."

This is nothing but stereotyping and bigotry disguised as "health issues."

This filthy bigotry can be found on ALL points on the political spectrum.

It's nobody's business what I use my SNAP card for, and I DO pay taxes.

[magical thyme]

3. junk food is not cheap.

It is no more expensive to eat a healthy diet than a junk food diet. It does take some thinking about what you are doing, some planning (far more than grabbing bags of chips and bottles of soda off the shelves) and a lot of discipline if you have kids screaming for candy.

And its that much harder if you've been raised on junk food and now are addicted to the sugar/salt/fat combo. So I do blame the junk food industry there, along with thoughtless parents. I've seen upper middle class mothers set a 16oz can of soda down in front of her 4 childrens' breakfast It's a disgrace the way some people behave. My own father practically force-fed us candy throughout our childhoods.

But just compare the price by weight of a bag of chips to comparable weights of actual food. And give up the soda altogether.

[seveneyes]

4. real culprit is the food industry?

Dangerous logic there. Who do we point the finger at for drunk drivers? Beer industry? Makers of fermentation yeast?

The hand that feeds is the hand that bleeds.