Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman continues his streak of taking up stances designed to maximally annoy the progressive voters who put him in office. In a post on Twitter (“X”), he said that while he supports maintaining SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Benefits), “taxpayers shouldn’t underwrite products devoid of nutritional value that undermine our nation’s health.” Fetterman posted a screenshot of a Wall Street Journal article about how Coca Cola and PepsiCo were lobbying to keep soda eligible for food stamps. 

Fetterman is signaling support for a plan pushed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has vowed to ban food stamp recipients from using benefits to purchase soda. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda,” he wrote that “it’s nonsensical for U.S. taxpayers to spend tens of billions of dollars subsidizing junk that harms the health of low-income Americans.” Republicans in Congress have been pushing the plan, with one saying that he was motivated by having visited a Circle K gas station and being appalled to see a family of poor people buying foods he thought they should not have bought: “In front of me is a family and I think they bought four ginger ales, a bag of chips, a bag of donuts, a Snickers bar and a Big Gulp and they paid with their food stamps.” 

The idea of restricting food stamp recipients from using SNAP for soda is cast by proponents as a public health measure that is opposed mainly by soda industry lobbyists. Kennedy casts unrestricted SNAP use as a handout to corporations that are poisoning people. In a paper advocating the restrictions on SNAP benefits, bioethicist Anne Barnhill says that while “industry groups” try to present the issue as one of consumer choice, in fact there is no ethical problem with restricting benefits, because it is good for people: 

Industry groups will cast any reduction in consumer choice as a significant loss of freedom, but it is important to recognize what this reduction in consumer choice does and does not amount to. SNAP participants will not experience a reduction in their level of assistance (i.e., the dollar amount). They will not experience a reduction in their ability to feed their families a nutritionally adequate diet. They will not experience a reduction in their overall level of nutrition or health. They will just experience a reduction in the kinds of beverages they can choose among when choosing how to feed themselves and their families. They will have fewer beverages to choose among than higher-income people have. The reduction in consumer choice caused by excluding sweetened beverages is not ethically decisive. […] Maximal consumer choice is incompatible with a nutritionally adequate diet, given the reality that many SNAP participants and other Americans choose to purchase a nutritionally inadequate diet when faced with a food environment that heavily promotes inexpensive, unhealthy food items. It is ethically justifiable to modestly limit the consumer choice afforded by SNAP to improve the nutrition and health of SNAP participants.… 

What’s wrong with this argument? We’re making people healthier! We’re stopping handouts to big corporations! But first, let’s remember that passing a law against something doesn’t magically stop that thing from happening. The law has to be implemented, which means that stores have to police the food choices of the poor, prohibiting them from buying certain items. And in America, where a lot of the available food is “junk,” if we’re serious about only allowing healthy food and beverages, a lot of stuff is going to be off the menu. Fruit juice, for instance, is often just as sugary as soda. Given the average American diet, if we were seriously going to restrict food stamps to healthy foods, half the grocery store would be off limits, and SNAP recipients would have to meticulously check nutrition facts labels—which don’t tell you clearly which foods are unhealthy, because the food industry has lobbied to make sure nutrition labels don’t contain warnings. Carefully figuring out which foods are healthy enough to be permissible would just add to the daily burdens of trying to survive as a poor person in America, and one suspects that Republicans are interested in this policy in part because it will deter people from using food stamps altogether and adds an extra layer of difficulty, rather than because they care about health. (They don’t care about health, and in other circumstances they don’t hesitate to make pro-“consumer choice” arguments if product restrictions would impact powerful industries such as dairy.) 

Notably, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not proposed to keep the non-poor from eating junk food and has “signaled that he does not intend to take ultra-processed foods off the market.” The rest of us will get guidelines, it’s people who can’t afford food that will get actual restrictions. Personally, I’m an egalitarian: I think if you’re going to say that the government should take on the task of forcing people to modify their diets, it should do it for everyone, not just those who can’t afford to eat. 

The idea that this is a way of taking on the for-profit food industry is an illusion. As I’ve noted, a great way to do that would be to introduce warning labels on unhealthy foods that actually show that they’re bad for you rather than just a neutral set of statistics. Warning labels wouldn’t restrict consumer choice, nor would they target only the poor. But the food industry is dead set against it and spreads propaganda to try to keep us from having more helpful nutrition labels. I’ve previously suggested another non-coercive way we could improve people’s ability to eat healthily: start public restaurants that offer 100 percent healthy options where people can eat for free. But RFK, Fetterman, and Congressional Republicans seem most intrigued by the idea that involves micromanaging the diets of the least well-off. (The idea of using food to make poor people miserable under the guise of health promotion also shows up in other ways. The New York Times just ran a story about workers in the prison kitchen at Rikers Island. The story noted that the kitchen forbids salt for “health reasons,” meaning prison food is made unpalatable for the prisoners' own good.)

This policy is unlikely to actually do much to improve health, for reasons laid out in the American Journal of Public Health. What it will do is make it even more difficult to be poor. We already put senseless restrictions on food stamps. Next time you see those “No Hot Food with EBT” signs, think about how cruel and stupid it is to deny prepared meals to the people least likely to have access to a kitchen. We literally tell unhoused people they can have raw beans but not cooked beans! I always think the no hot food rule is one of the most quietly dystopian features of American life, but adding a “no sodas or desserts” rule is just stacking cruelty atop cruelty. Let them eat cake. No, really. People should have cake. And a Coke or a frappuccino, too, from time to time. If you want to make people healthy, there are better ways to do that, ones that don’t involve insulting them or punishing them. Give them healthcare. Increase their ability to walk or ride a bike or join a gym. Crack down on corporate polluters. And, most obviously, target the companies that make junk food, not the people who buy it.