It doesn't seem insane to me, just a reflection of the reality that people sometimes buy unhealthy foods - for both legit and frivolous reasons.

Sometimes your kid will only eat sugary cereals for breakfast, because children can be fussy eaters. Or maybe you want to kick back with a can of Coke after a hard day at work (or need the caffeine to wake up for work in the morning, and coffee is too expensive). Or you want some Snickers bars to take on the train or bus to snack on. Policing what kind of food people spend their food stamps on seems like a pointless waste of time and government resources to me.

Let me guess...American? Because coming from outside, the way you pile sugar into everything (including breakfast) is just insane and aa little stomach churning.

Obviously it's a bit nurture on both our parts, but sugar for breakfast is crazy, as is being taught that things like soda or snickers should ever be eaten except for in exceptional/celebratory circumstances.

One needs to be taught that those food stuffs are acceptable and gain a palette for them, because foreigners find your food sickly sweet. Clearly this is a policy/cultural thing...

Guessed wrong! I do live in the US at present, however.

> Obviously it's a bit nurture on both our parts, but sugar for breakfast is crazy, as is being taught that things like soda or snickers should ever be eaten except for in exceptional/celebratory circumstances.

There's always a gap between how things should be done and how they are actually done. I personally don't eat sugary cereals, or drink soda. I like sweets and candy and I'll admit it's a struggle to control sometimes, especially when I'm stressed out. I won't judge someone in far worse circumstances than I for indulging in sugar - it might be the only good thing in their life. And I don't approve of government resources being spent on checking what kind of food people eat - you can get far more bang for your buck elsewhere.

> Sometimes your kid will only eat sugary cereals for breakfast

Present healthy food. Vary it day over day in case they really do have some strong dislike for something. If they don't eat it, they weren't very hungry. They will eat cereal every time you give it to them, no matter how hungry they are, which is part of the problem. Do not feed them crap because "that's all they'll eat".

I don't have children. I have friends who have children. I don't know if you have children. I have seen that children can be stubborn in their eating habits - I know I was.

Low-income parents may be hesitant to introduce new, healthy foods to kids because if the kid doesn't like it, it's time and money wasted (assuming the parent can't finish it). They're more likely to buy something the kid is sure to eat.

> If they don't eat it, they weren't very hungry

That's what I think to myself also whenever I see a parent running after a child trying to feed them. But parents can't seem to find peace unless the child finishes their meal. I've also heard children get cranky because they're hungry, but don't eat because they haven't learned that it will make them feel better. Being in that situation as a parent seems horrible. I'm willing to believe that stressed out low-income parents would rather that the kid eats anything, even crap, than face a meltdown.

> Do not feed them crap because "that's all they'll eat".

If I ever have children, this is my plan. But I have also heard that plans don't survive contact with the enemy...

Yeah, I've got three of the little buggers. Thanks for keeping it civil, I could have been less blunt in my initial response.

I'm a little sensitive to this one because my wife and several of my friends are teachers and I gather it's really, really common for even fairly well-off kids' breakfast, every day, to be a couple pop-tarts. Which is a dessert, and isn't even on the healthier end of that category. As long as that continues to be as normal as it is, our obesity epidemic's going no-where.

Definitely don't blame low-income folks for doing what they need to do to get through the day, and yeah, food waste can really suck when you're not handing your kids hyper-palatable food for every meal, with the extra kick in the teeth that the hyper-palatable stuff's often easier to prepare. I mostly just weep for the future when I hear about the clearly-middle-class-or-higher folks doing that, or see them feeding their kids snacks (almost always crackers or similar) in the store to keep them docile, or whatever.

> If I ever have children, this is my plan. But I have also heard that plans don't survive contact with the enemy...

It's for sure harder to do it right. Snacks do shut them up, and in that weeks-to-months period when they just won't STFU at the store damn it, you do wanna just shove some crackers in their face so they'll quit making a scene. But if you do you'll have to keep doing it and then you're the parent with the six-year-old still snacking in the store. They will eat crap for any meal at all, or between meals, because it's crap and tastes freakin' amazing. That's the point of it. You just gotta suppress fear of judgement and keep in mind that the (medical) pros say skipping or picking at 50-60% of meals is totally normal for kids, and they will not starve themselves into ill health just because green beans don't trigger the same primal OMG-I-need-more-of-this responses as Doritos do.

The only place this is hard for us is with the grandparents. OMG there's no stopping them short of just cutting them off, which is too harsh for us to stomach. So much junk food. But that's how they eat too—they just don't get it, and that kind of deep cultural difficulty with food is why it's such a pain to do things right on an individual level. And school-provided lunches are pretty bad. The ones around here, at least, are clearly designed to shove as many calories as possible into the poorer kids, damn the nutrition and good eating habits.

The government ought to be in the business of making sugary drinks and snacks subject to the general market (I.e., through eliminating subsidies for corn and refined sugars) and not trying to become experts in what should and should not be in poor people’s shopping carts. Restrictions like that only lead to people selling their benefits at a loss for cash to get what they want.

Reducing food deserts, increasing healthy food programs for children, and eliminating market distorting subsidies are less paternalistic and more effective.

The amount of money we just gave Jeff Bezos for putting a headquarters near his new house would fund the entire US food stamp program for a week or two, or if you prefer depth instead of breadth, would fund food stamps for hundreds of thousands of people for the rest of their lives.

And with the returns from that money "we just gave" Bezos, we can fund many times that. And if "we" don't get that return? Bezos doesn't get that money.

The winning localities and companies offered $2 billion in rebates to amazon over 10 years, conditional upon job and revenue targets that guarantee the localities and companies are getting multiple times the rebate amount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_HQ2

Marketwatch put the local economic contribution at up to $17 billion per year (not per 10 years like the $2 billion). https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-hq2-could-bring-lo...

Sounds like an amazing ROI.

My only question is, how can I give Bezos money for that kind of guaranteed return?

To be fair, it's much easier to separate "food" from "not food" than to have to qualify whether any particular product is "good" or "junk" food.

Can you imagine the additional bureaucracy needed to classify (and enforce) the use of food stamps on a more granular level?

They seem to do just fine with the WIC program. Make food stamps just like WIC.

Or just give people cash and let them make their own decisions.