I’ve had tripe, tongue, cow cheek, chorizo… wont’ do brain… the taco places will serve them. Cheek is fatty and it’s like eating fat, and the tongue texture… I can’t get past it. To say that tongue is a staple in the USA would be a stretch though. Aka Beverly Cleary used it to gross out kids for a reason.
I don’t know what Westerners do with tongue, the main time I ever eat it is Korean BBQ, where it’s frozen then sliced super thin, like lunch meat. It’s great that way, but I understand the texture is challenging if it isn’t sliced very thin.
Oh you poor dear.
Most SNAP recipients can only use it for food (and it can’t be hot food). It’s actually very frustrating not being able to buy toilet paper of bandaids when you need them.
Yeah, crime is crime.
I doubt the fraud is common enough to actually support the cost of administrating and enforcing this. EBT cards are often reused, they don’t bother printing names on them. So now you’re talking about making unique cards for all recipients, including minors who might have need to help with shopping and they aren’t always going to be old enough for government IDs. All to stop a small amount of fraud.
How are you getting these food boxes to isolated Inuit villages in Alaska? What are you sending families with serious allergies to peanuts or gluten.
Probably the same way you are getting the food they buy with food stamps?
Ok, step back for a moment. You realize this is a ridiculously solvable problem, right?
You make a system where people can go online and have them select what foods they want in their box every week.
This is how lots of co-ops work. Hell, I know someone who is part of this program
https://www.imperfectproduce.com
It’s actually cool, you can get perfectly good produce that is cosmetically imperfect.
I’m not suggesting that poor people get such produce (even though I think everyone really should be eating produce that didn’t look as pretty as the stuff that dominates commercial produce). I’m using it as an example of the kind of system that can enable people to get food from such a communal system, while also customizing it to fit their dietary needs.
Although, little pet peeve here… Gluten? The number of people who think that they need to avoid gluten is absurd. Virtually no one has a problem with gluten. But tons of idiots think that it’s somehow bad for them.
Yes, I realize that celiac disease is a real thing, but it’s not even remotely common enough to justify the recent fixation with gluten free crap.
Again, I’m totally in support of helping the small number of people with legitimate gluten allergies… I’m just annoyed by so many people avoiding gluten without even knowing why.
Why does this annoy you? How can you go from letting people select what they want to being mad if people want to avoid gluten. It’s not as if people avoiding gluten means you can’t have as much gluten as you can desire.
I think you believe this will be a lot more efficient than it will actually be. I have zero confidence that a 40+million people are going to one, have access to go online, remember how great online is in rural areas, and two, have a system ready for them if they even attempted to proceed with this plan.
It’s annoying because they are being idiots, manipulated by other idiots into thinking that a totally harmless protein is somehow bad for them.
Again, it’s not some huge problem. It’s just an annoyance to me. It’s a symptom of a deeper lack of critical thinking skills.
It certainly wouldn’t be trivial to set up, but I totally believe we could do it. It’s not like landing a man on the moon.
Also, bear in mind that my goal for such a system wouldn’t be to save money. It’d be too improve the nutrition of people, so they are healthier. I assume that such a system would cost more than the current system, but it suspect it would be better for society.
That’s not fair Brian. There’s a difference when we’re talking about making policy which aggregates the sum of a very large number, and when we’re talking about individual experiences, and not every experience that every person ever has has to align with our preconceived political positions.
I knew a girl who went to Washington University in St. Louis who was held up at gun point by two black men and robbed at night. Once she was followed by a carful of black men (i wasn’t there, i don’t know the actual number) for 30 minutes while she was running alone. She now refuses to live in a neighborhood with black people. I’m not going to use her individual experiences to make policy but i’m also not going to call her a liar because America on the aggregate is racist, and i’m not going to lecture her on how to feel about being a victim of crime either. One of my cousin’s good friends was walking on 6th Street in Austin with a group of her female friends and was confronted by a butch lesbian, who for whatever reason - i couldn’t possible get the full story so i’m just relating what was told - tried hitting on her and was rebuked. Something happened, and the older woman hit the girl square in the face and knocked her out, causing her to hit her head on concrete. Now the girl has neurological damage and has difficulty walking. I’m not going to tell my cousin her friend is lying because LGBTQ people suffer greatly, in the aggregate.
Why not just accept that ducker saw the 1.5% of fraud or whatever and move on? It is absolutely possible that one person saw one other person one time do something that fit a stereotype. It’s weird you guys are arguing that it didn’t happen. Of course it could happen and is strange you (all) are doubling down on the reality of it rather than trying to foolishness of making national policy on a single data point.
Oh sure. We could do a lot of things better than we do now. SNAP is a successful program, not only designed to ramp up during hard times but able to do so smoothly and then shrink as is. It is also making it’s goal. It’s one of the last programs we need to mess with. But they’re not doing this to improve the program. This administration wants to save money, and they’re incompetent.
I don’t see how shipping food from across the country is better than the local offerings here. Our food is cheaper than most the online stores offer, it’s fresh, and it supports the community. Now in areas that don’t have that, sure, but they’re not really talking about local sourcing or even fresh food at all.
I wouldn’t ship across the country. I’d have farmers sign up and work with local producers to support the local communities, as much as possible.
Okay. I can buy that. We have co-ops, farmer’s market, groups, whatever they want to call it that take EBT cards today.
Do you ave any reason to believe that’s what Trump is actually proposing though?
Coming up with a cheaper way to distribute food than Walmart, Winco, asian grocery stores, etc. already do would be a hell of a lot bigger challenge than landing a man on the moon. Every couple weeks I go to the store and pay about $20 for the ingredients to make 12 meals of relatively-healthy stir fry. There’s no way any government program could beat that.
The real challenge I can see for people on SNAP is that you need access to a kitchen and time to cook. I can’t even imagine what it would be like for a single mother trying to work, take care of their kids, and spend an hour a day cooking.
Except that wont happen. It will be lowest bid and almost pure graft, while also costing 10 times what it does now and people will probably literally starve because some min-wage, sub-contracted dude got stoned and forgot to deliver food to a hundred people that month.
It would be a nightmare under a great government imo. Under Trump? You might as well just march people off to Siberia and leave them to die and then burn $100 billion dollars on the White House lawn and just save some time.
Let’s say this happens. Imagine everything goes perfectly smoothly, regardless of how likely or not that is. Let’s say there’s zero corruption/fraud on the side of the suppliers, as well.
- food waste: fresh food goes bad fast. It would have to be eaten very quickly, and would have to be delivered on a more frequent basis than once a month. This leads to…
- increased cost: warehousing and delivery aren’t free, so taxpayer expenses rise.
- let’s say we can get over the philosophical notion that freedom of choice on what food to eat isn’t important. That still doesn’t get over the fact some people can’t handle various foods for biological or religious reasons (once could argue ethical, as well, but I’m also putting that aside). Suppose there’s a database which people can put dietary restrictions into in order to receive different packages. This then leads back to added costs, as that’s an additional infrastructure cost to maintain. Don’t want to bother? That leads back to food waste.
- liability and oversight: suppose something does go wrong. Who’s to blame? The farmers? The government? IANAL, but I’d be pretty sure it’s both. This would create a need for additional oversight, which leads back to even more expenses.
Those are just a few issues that someone who has yet to have his morning coffee came up with off the top of his head.
Please, if his telling wasn’t a rehash of the same welfare queen talking points I’ve been hearing for years, then maybe I’d have reacted differently, but nope, same old “they’re buying lobster with their food stamps” bullhonkey.
Yeah, I have no idea how they get me 2 lbs of fresh book choy for like 3 bucks, but somehow they do.
My mom always claimed it was just a question of volume and economies of scale, but I have no idea.
I’ve decided they must be money laundering ops, man. Except HMart. That place is expensive as fuck. Worth it though.
The way that the President has laid out this proposal sure makes it look like an awful idea. Inefficient, rife with fraud potential, probably more expensive than SNAP, socially punitive toward the poor, and all the other things that have been pointed out above.
Having said that, the idea of distributing food (instead of just money) is not inherently a terrible one. We have a network of food banks in this country that do pretty much exactly that. They don’t have a ton of resources, so they largely depend on donations. They struggle with many of the things that have been brought up in this thread…how do you deal with fresh produce, providing appropriate items for folks with allergies or other dietary restrictions, transporting the food to remote areas. And they come up with solutions, both at the local level and as a national network. While they’re certainly not perfect, food banks largely do a good job within the restrictions of their limited resources.
In the last couple of years there have been several excellent articles and podcasts talking about how the food bank system works. They basically have their own mini economy via an online marketplace, where donations are cataloged and food banks around the country can bid on them.
And this podcast from Planet Money:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/25/457408717/episode-665-the-pickle-problem
Scaling up the food bank system as an alternative to SNAP - not a total replacement! - doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. Right now it helps to fill in the gaps for folks that don’t get SNAP or don’t get enough from it. I realize that’s not what Trump is proposing, but the conversation could lead in that direction.
You don’t need to do it more cheaply. Or, to be clear, you don’t need to do it PROFITABLY like those companies do.
The purpose of the program wouldn’t be to earn money. The purpose would be to improve the health and wellbeing of the American population, which will save us in medical costs.
While hard, it’s something that people used to do. Cooking doesn’t need to be some horrific chore. It can be an opportunity to do things with kids.
And having those kids eat good food will pay dividends down the road.
I wondered why some people on here seemed so intent on arguing that somebody didn’t see what they saw. Fraud happens, anyone want to argue with that. So somebody saw fraud happen. Doesn’t mean it happens all the time or that everyone does it.
But since this is the internet and you don’t have to call someone a liar to their face some people on here have no problem doing this.
Thanks Internet.