Discounts on Food Stamps for Healthier Food
I did a little happy dance when I saw this article in the Boston Globe. Residents who receive food stamps in Western Massachusetts will be able to buy fruits and vegetables at a 30% discount.
This is huge!
People with tight budgets have every right to complain about the higher cost of healthier food. I cringed when I watched a family of four in Food, Inc. try to sort out healthy food at the grocery store. The daughter wanted to buy an apple but the family couldn’t afford it with the limited resources they had. They bought junk food instead. For the Mom calories were more important than quality.
So if tomatoes and carrots and grapes cost the same or less than a bag of potato chips, the hope is that families will choose the fruits and veggies. This is a $20 million project affecting 50,000 households and the experiment will run over a period of 15 months. If it works, it’ll get rolled out to other parts of the country!
Woo hoo! So if you’re living in Western Massachusetts and you receive food stamps or know someone who does, please encourage them to eat more produce. The fate of the entire rest of the country could literally lie in their pantries.
What do you think about this program? What do you hope the outcome will be?
Lisa
Popularity: 5% [?]
It’s about time healthier food was an option for low income families.
Good Post.
This is wonderful news. If they would only do that in every state. I’m a big proponent of dropping the corn subsidies and subsidizing fruits and veggies. I do think that if you know how to shop and can take a little time to go a few places, you can eat healthy for less.
For me, I see potato chips as too expensive. It takes away from me being able to buy healthier food that is better for my family. For example, I can get enough carrots, celery, and cucumber to pre-chop for my daughter and I to snack on for a whole week for the price of a large bag of name brand chips. Granted, I make yogurt based ranch for us to dip in, which adds a couple of bucks to the cost, but you don’t have to do that.
If calories are an issue on a budget, rice and pasta are good for that, as is butter. you get about 2400 calories out of a box of butter, which can be had on sale for $3.00.
Sorry to babble. I just think the difference in perspective between myself and people who feel they have to buy chips because fruit is too costly is interesting. It’s the other way around for me.