SNAP to it!
Tuesday, May 14th, 2013By Rosalie Tirella
Three cheers! Massachusetts may create a new rule for folks on food stamps – the SNAP program, as it’s called today. Soon poorer folks who have a SNAP card to pay for their groceries may not be able to spend their federal/state benefit on soda. You know Mountain Dew, Pepsi, Coke, etc. I say HOORAY to this development!
The SNAP program is a government program that is all about keeping poorer families, struggling families, healthy and strong. Why should tax payer money be used to subsidize soneone’s stupidity? Or ignorance? Or thoughtless parenting? People need to be more mindful of what they are putting into their bodies and do the best they can with the resources they have.
My Polish and Italian immigrant grandparents were poor, but their families ate so well! Gardens supplied fresh veggies. Everything was made from scratch. My mom used to love to tell me stories about how she and her dad, my Grandpa, used to leave their Green Island tenement to go mushroom and berry picking in the wilds of Worcester. My grandpa even kept rabbits on the back porch which he butchered for my granny to make into stew. That is until the Worcester Board of Health shut his little operation down! My relatives were people of the earth, in the Old Country. They knew good food when they saw it. They knew how to grow it, nurture it, prepare it, even, sadly, slaughter it.
If you are a parent or guardian and you want to feed your family food that will keep them alert, capable, etc, you buy milk, low sugar cranberry or orange juice, V-8 (low salt), even. But for Christ’s sake you don’t feed them Dr. Pepper!
We won’t go into the fact that 90% of the stuff you buy at the grocery store is already pumped up with enough sugar for millions of sugar rushes. Why make things worse with a can of soda?
We can hope to educate families on SNAP, but that’s a process we may not have time for, seeing every other person in America seems obese/pre-diabetic/diabetic and/or suffering from the sclorosis of some vital organ. Depressing.
I have seen four year olds with cavities galore because their parents put soda or sweet juice in their milk bottles. By sucking on that thing, all day, the little ones’ teeth were exposed to sugar, the #1 cause of tooth decay, FOR HOURS ON END. My heart broke when a friend, who fed her little son juice in his baby bottle, told me her little sweetie had to go to the dentist to have many of his baby teeth filled with silver. Cavities that were causing pain for her little cutie.
Kids need fresh fruits and veggies and whole grains and eggs and other kinds of protein to grow. Grow their brains, as well as their bodies.
Poor people are born behind the eight ball. By making it easier for them to buy more good food, and less bad food, ie soda pop, the state of MA is improving lives, using public money for the public good.
