A Social Worker’s Perspective
Yesterday morning, I was watching a news report on another state introducing a bill aimed at restricting “junk food” from SNAP programs, otherwise known as food stamps. During the 2025 KY legislative session, a similar bill was introduced that was fortunately withdrawn and did not advance to committee or a vote. While a variety of bills were introduced, House Bill 279 by Matt Lockett of Nicholasville was Kentucky’s version of a “Food Stamp Junk Food” bill.
The goal of the bill was to restrict certain foods for purchase with SNAP dollars. Lockett’s alleged reasoning is to prioritize health, but I’m not buying it. Especially because this study from Harnack, Oakes, and Elbel showed that food restrictions only reduced purchases of foods categorized as “junk” with no significant nutritional difference in diet compared to the control group. Additionally, Rep. Lockett’s background is in finance, not health. This bill is an attempt to poor-blame and poor-shame.
Why is it wrong to tell people what they can and can’t buy with their food stamps? It assumes that poor people aren’t smart or responsible enough to make their own choices. Furthermore, how will the state objectively define healthy when a variety of diets are needed for different individuals? Food insecurity is so incredibly complex and we don’t understand each individual or family’s unique situation.
As an oncology social worker, I support many individuals experiencing cancers that limit their ability to eat certain foods. For the patient who has experienced significant weight loss from poor appetite and constant chemotherapy-induced nausea, I have worked alongside oncology dieticians who recommend patients use vanilla ice cream to blend with whole milk, fruit, and Ensure to create a milkshake that sits easier on the stomach, tastes great, and the ice cream adds some necessary fat to the diet that initiates needed weight gain.
If you want the poor people in our state to be healthier, focus your legislative attention on funding preventative health and exercise incentives for Medicaid and Medicare program recipients
You know how many of the cancer patients I serve who are eligible for food stamps because the only income they have is a piddly social security retirement or disability check? I can assure you it’s much more than just a handful. Who are we to tell a dying person that they can’t have ice cream?
Restricting candy? How about the little girl in your child’s class being raised by a single mom working as hard as she can? Maybe that little girl wants to be like the other children in their class and send home a sucker to their classmates on Valentine’s Day. Guess how that bag of DumDums is purchased? Food stamps.
Restricting prepared cakes and pop? How about a child from a “working-poor” paycheck-to-paycheck family whose parent purchases a birthday cake from the Kroger bakery with their SNAP card? Seen the egg shortage and price increase lately? What if that family wants to make a “Sprite” cake that uses only a box of cake mix and a can of Sprite, which is technically a more economically responsible recipe than one that includes using eggs, milk, and oil.
I’m not just speaking from my professional experience. I’m speaking about my personal life, too. As a child, I spent mornings, afternoons, summer days, and weekends at my foster grandmother’s home while my parents were at work, and my home environment was often unstable anyway. Because she was a polio survivor, her condition as a paraplegic restricted her ability to work, so she was a SNAP recipient. We loved staying at her home because there was always more food in her home than our own. You know what kept breakfast in my belly those mornings before school? Food stamps.
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You know how I was able to eat dinners after school? Food stamps. Sometimes, summer lunches consisted of generic pizza rolls because 7‑year-old me could pop them in the microwave on my own on days when there wasn’t another adult around to lift my grandmother from her bed to her wheelchair in order to come out to the kitchen and prepare us a meal.
Rep. Lockett’s background is in finance, not health. Therefore, I want to challenge Rep. Lockett and any other supporter of this bill to read this article and take suggestions (that are actually evidence-based and grounded in public health research).
If you want the poor people in our state to be healthier, focus your legislative attention on funding preventative health and exercise incentives for Medicaid and Medicare program recipients. We could fully cover comprehensive nutrition education and counseling from registered dieticians with Medicaid and Medicare programs. After all, a stronger focus on preventative health means less state dollars would be spent on treating illnesses like diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.
Other ideas include providing tax incentives to fitness centers who offer deep discounts on memberships for people with limited income, increasing funding for our public-school nutrition programs to afford more fruits and vegetables and less processed foods, and covering a wider selection of weight-loss medications for Medicaid or Medicare recipients. These aren’t the only solutions available. It’ll take a comprehensive approach to solve a comprehensive problem. If our state and federal legislators used opinions from actual specialists on certain subjects to create bills and took the experiences of their constituents who experience economic hardship into consideration, we could alleviate poverty and government spending.
