Several states have for years been preoccupied with trying to control what kind of food low-income residents purchase with their food stamps. In the latest example, Arkansas state Rep. Mary Bentley filed a bill on Thursday that would block people from using food stamps to purchase junk food, WTHR-TV reported. Her bill would prevent food stamp recipients from buying things like soda, chips and candy.
It was Bentley’s second attempt after a similar measure failed to pass in 2017, but Arkansas was far from alone. Other states have also insisted on trying to ban the purchase of junk food with food stamps.
See Also: Salvation Army Opens Baltimore Grocery Store To Address Food Deserts
In 2017, at least five states—Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, New Mexico and Tennessee—introduced bills that asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for permission to ban junk food purchases with food stamps, according to the Pew Trust. They need permission because the UDSA administers the food stamp program. Past failures to obtain federal approval have not stopped states from continuing their efforts.
Maine, like Arkansas, made a second attempt in 2018 to pass a junk food-food stamps ban that failed.
These repeated attempts to ban junk food, while seemingly well-intentioned, ignore the lack of access to inexpensive healthy food choices in many low-income communities. Indeed, there seems to be no end to food deserts, which the USDA has broadly defined as neighborhoods—even in large, urban communities—that don’t have large supermarkets or grocery stores nearby.
These food purchase guidelines keep coming while the estimated number of low-income communities lacking relatively close access to a supermarket or large food-selling store has increased, according to a 2017 report from the FDA.
The department defined a reasonable distance from supermarkets as more than a mile in an urban community or 10 miles in a rural area. Between 2010 and 2015, the number of poor neighborhoods that found themselves in food deserts increased from 8,959 to 9,245. A major part of the problem is a lack of transportation for people who live in food deserts, the department said.
Arkansas has one of the worse cases in the nation of poor people living in food deserts.
“Every single county of our 75 counties has at least one area that’s considered a food desert,” Kathy Webb, executive director for the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance, told KATV.
She added that part of the solution is for states to offer incentives to grocers to locate in food deserts. Another way to eliminate the problem is for the lawmakers to organize delivery of fresh produce through mobile food banks.
SEE ALSO:
Thousands Of Georgians Had Their Food Stamps Cut By The Trump Administration
Let Them Eat Cake: Trump Wants To Replace Food Stamps With Food Boxes
