The vibe shift is powerful. But is it powerful enough to beat Big Soda and Big Grocery?
Obesity and its evil twin—diabetes—are corroding America’s health. These chronic ailments also disproportionately afflict the poor. Yet for years, the federal government has been paying for soda, cookies, candy, and other nutritionally empty, obesity-engendering foods, via its main source of anti-hunger aid for low-income people: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as food stamps.
Reformers who take the word nutrition seriously have repeatedly tried to limit or ban the use of SNAP benefits for junk food. And they have just as repeatedly been thwarted by the beverage and grocery lobbies, whose influence extends from Congress, to the Department of Agriculture, to nonprofit policy shops and think tanks.
Now, though, the lobbies’ hammerlock may be breakable, thanks to a convergence of interests between GOP spending hawks, both state and federal, and the MAHA movement, led by the new secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.