How about a bill banning soda sales at the House of
Representatives' cafeterias?
I spent a few months
on food stamps this year. As a single woman in San Diego, I qualified for $70 a
month — less than a dollar per meal. But I’m lucky and I’m unusual because many
of my friends are farmers and gardeners and I know how to forage wild foods.
Determined to stretch
my $70 a month budget to somehow cover a healthy diet, I harvested wild cactus
pads and edible weeds from my neighbors’ yards. Friends gave me fruit from
their trees. A farmer told me to take whatever I needed from his stand at the
farmers’ market. Then I used the food stamps to acquire foods I couldn’t get
for free: milk, oatmeal, beans, and so on. All organic.
It worked, thanks to great effort. I cooked my own meals, made my own bread, and even my own jam, yogurt, and sauerkraut. If I worked for a company or in an office, instead of working from home as my own boss, I doubt I would have had time to do this. And how many people, when they fall on hard times, already possess the knowledge and tools to grow, forage, and cook their own food like I did?
Maggie Dickinson, a
PhD student in anthropology, spent a year and a half finding out first hand at
a Brooklyn food pantry. She found that the people she interviewed — all either food stamp
recipients or people who relied on the food pantry for staples — were often
knowledgeable about the need for a healthy diet and desirous to eat well.
They just couldn’t
afford it.
She writes about
Martha, a 24-year-old woman with a young son. Martha is on food stamps, and she
loves to cook. “Sometimes I’ll have to go for maybe the fattiest of the
processed stuff because sometimes that’s cheaper than the healthier foods,” she
admits.
A man named Nelson
told her he wants to eat healthy foods like seafood and vegetables, but he
can’t afford to think about his health. “When I’m hungry, I need to eat
whatever thing,” he says. He buys whatever’s on sale, healthy or not.
How can we help folks
like Martha and Nelson improve their diets? Dickinson proposes giving them more
money in food stamps so they can afford the healthy foods they want. But Rep.
Phil Roe has a different idea. The Tennessee Republican wants to ban them from
using food stamps for junk foods like soda.
There’s not one
redeeming quality about soda, nutritionally speaking. Even beer contains
vitamins, but not soda. Beer, by the way, is off-limits if you’re using food
stamps. Uncle Sam doesn’t buy your alcohol.
What irks me is Roe’s
hypocrisy and his elitism. Wealthy congressmen like Roe can dictate what the
poor get to eat, but nobody gets to tell the rich what to eat. Would Roe accept
a bill banning soda sales at the House of Representatives’ cafeterias?
When New York Mayor
Michael Bloomberg attempted to limit the serving size of soda to 16 ounces, he
wound up in court. The appeals process will stretch beyond the end of his third
term in office.
And Bloomberg wasn’t
even limiting soda consumption. Under the rules he tried to impose in the five
boroughs, you could buy an entire gallon of soda and drink it in one sitting,
if it came in 16 oz servings. His serving rule had a sound basis in behavioral
research, and probably would have improved health without curtailing freedom.
But the courts have so
far sided with the bottled drink industry in supporting a right for New Yorkers
to large serving sizes. And cutting soft-drink consumption with a soda tax has
met with opposition whenever it’s proposed. But it’s somehow OK to tell the
poor what they are allowed to eat.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author
of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do
to Fix It. OtherWords.org