By Cole Gee | Staff Writer
After his recent nomination to secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has expressed a desire to “Make America Healthy Again” by removing junk food from Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. Junk food has been on the chopping block for years, but now there seems to be a growing momentum to get this done.
SNAP, food stamps and EBT each run under a different name but the goal is ultimately the same –– to support lower-income families with their grocery shopping. As of 2023, around 42.1 million or 12.6% of the U.S. population rely on SNAP for grocery shopping.
Dr. Craig Gundersen is a professor of economics and a chair of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty. As an expert in SNAP and food insecurity, his work has been cited and used across the country. One of his many reasons for supporting SNAP comes from the fact that the program gives “dignity and autonomy” to its struggling users.
“I think SNAP is a great program so far as it respects the dignity and autonomy of recipients,” Gundersen said. “It also gives autonomy to SNAP recipients as a lesson to choose whatever they wish to purchase.”
The core issue at hand with these proposed junk food restrictions is that they challenge SNAP users’ autonomy. Many critics of SNAP point to the idea that taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for unhealthy and sugar-filled food when there are so many healthy alternatives available. Gundersen, however, explains that many SNAP users have access to healthy alternatives, but healthy foods in this country are notoriously expensive.
“It keeps on coming up that people don’t have access to healthy foods, which is just a myth,” Gundersen said. “For example, SNAP redemptions, which is one example of how vulnerable Americans are snapping to spend their money, 80% of snap dollars are spent at large-scale supermarkets or supercenters, 10% are spent at supermarkets, 90% of all SNAP dollars are spent at places where ‘healthy food’ is very easy to get to.”
Many local programs across the country have also worked to address food insecurity, and one of them is even located here in Waco.
Dr. Jeremy Everett is the founder and executive director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty. The organization’s main goal is to “end hunger through policy, education, community organizing and community development.” Policy and productive programs are some of the main ways Everett works to fight food insecurity, and he reiterates that restricting food is a step backward in the fight against food insecurity.
“We have food deserts all over rural America,” Everett said. “Somewhere between 22 million and 40 million people live in rural food deserts, not to mention urban and suburban food deserts. There are a number of different initiatives that we can initiate to get healthy food access to households that don’t have it. What we want to do is say ‘how do we solve that?’ Not ‘how do we restrict access to certain foods for low-income households?’ We’re trying to solve the wrong problem in my opinion.”
Any changes to the guidelines of SNAP would require a vote from Congress to change the law. So for now, the 42.1 million SNAP users still have access to their sweet treats, but that can all change very soon.
