Food stamp bills seek to restrict junk food [View all]
Food stamp bills seek to restrict junk food
Florida legislation is the latest to prohibit shoppers from buying 'nonstaple, unhealthy foods' with federal aid. It's a trend driven by health concerns but also by tight budgets.
Reporting from Atlanta—
Ronda Storms is a Republican state senator from Florida. She is also a mom who buys the groceries for her family of four.
A few months ago, Storms, 46, started noticing that some fellow shoppers were using federal food stamp money to purchase a lot of unhealthful junk. And it galled her — at a time when Florida was cutting Medicaid reimbursement rates, public school funding and jobs — that people were indulging in sugary, fatty, highly-processed treats on the public dime.
"If we're going to be cutting services across the board," she said, "then people can live without potato chips, without store-bought cookies, without their sodas."
That sense of unfairness, plus a concern about the health of needy children, is the motivation behind a bill Storms sponsored that would prohibit people from purchasing "nonstaple, unhealthy foods" with funds provided by the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
The bill, which was approved 4 to 2 last week by a committee on child and elderly affairs that Storms chairs, is the latest in a flurry of recent statehouse efforts to restrict what shoppers can buy under the federal government's decades-old food stamp program.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-food-stamps-20120130,0,1265987.story
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