Republicans Are Right About Soda
Sarah Palin knew her audience. In 2013, during a speech at CPAC, the annual Republican confab, the former Alaska governor reached down into her lectern and pulled out a cup of soda the size of her head. She took a long swig, and then another, as the audience broke into raucous applause. Palin put the drink down and delivered the punch line: “Our Big Gulp's safe,” she said. At the time, New York City was attempting to ban restaurants from selling sodas larger than 16 ounces, and Republicans across the country were angry at then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The nanny state, they argued, was trying to take away their corn-syrup-laden fizzy water. A conservative advocacy group paid to publish an ad in The New York Times of “Nanny Bloomberg” wearing a powder-blue dress and a pastel scarf.
The soda wars have long broken along partisan lines. New York City’s ban was struck down in court before it could go into effect, but even more modest attempts to regulate soda have been concentrated in deeply blue cities such as Berkeley and San Francisco. Liberals drink soda too, of course, though the drink’s biggest defenders are on the right. President Donald Trump loves Diet Coke so much that in both of his terms, he’s had a button installed in the Oval Office to summon a refill; on the campaign trail, now–Vice President J. D. Vance claimed that Democrats see Diet Mountain Dew, his drink of choice, as “racist.”
[Read: J.D. Vance has a point about Mountain Dew]
But today, Republicans across the country are cracking down on soda. Politicians in Texas, Arkansas, West Virginia, Idaho, Nebraska, Michigan, Arizona, and South Carolina are not advocating for the ban of Big Gulps. They are, however, seeking to enact one of Michael Bloomberg's other pet policies: preventing people from buying soda using food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP). These and other states are following the lead of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been vocal about his desire to not let poor Americans on SNAP use government money to buy soda. “Why are we paying for sugar drinks that are poisoning our kids and giving them diabetes?” he asked last week.
Banning soda from SNAP seems like a no-brainer. Soda is a big reason adults in the United States consume, on average, two to three times more than the daily recommended intake of sugar. The federal government’s own research has shown that Americans who receive food stamps have worse diets than nonparticipants with similar incomes, and soda is surely part of that problem. These proposed bans should be even more palatable because they wouldn’t be permanent; they are pilot programs to try out the idea. Yet Democrats, for the most part, now remain firmly opposed to soda bans. No Democrat serving in the state Senates of Idaho or Arizona voted for their state’s respective measure. If America is actually going to do something about soda, tests like this will have to be part of the answer.
Nowhere is the Republican Party’s about-face on soda more stark than in West Virginia. In July, the state removed its soda tax. And now, less than a year later, it is pushing forward with a SNAP soda ban as part of an effort to decrease consumption of “ultra-processed crap that barely qualifies as food,” Republican Governor Patrick Morrisey said late last month. Banning the use of SNAP funds to purchase soda has become so popular because it combines the “Make America healthy again” focus on America’s diet problems with the conservative desire to reform the welfare state. Multiple Republicans sponsoring these bills told me they have no intention or desire to dictate what foods people spend their own money on. “If you are using your own funds, I don’t think it’s any different than cigarettes and alcohol,” Idaho State Representative Jordan Redman told me. “We know those aren’t good for us, but if you’re using your own dollars for it, that’s your decision.”
So far, none of these states has actually banned soda from SNAP. The federal government sets the rules for food stamps, even though the program is operated by each state. So a state looking to exclude soda has to request an exception to the rules. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders was the first to express interest in the policy following Trump’s latest election. “The time has come to support American farmers and end taxpayer-funded junk food,” Sanders wrote to Kennedy and Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in December, before either was confirmed for their position. Although previous attempts to enact such a policy, such as in New York City, were blocked by USDA regulators, it seems that won’t be the case this time around. Rollins, who will have the final say in deciding whether states get to experiment with this idea, has indicated she supports the states’ efforts and will likely approve requests that come her way.
But many long-standing anti-soda advocates are skeptical. Marion Nestle, a professor emeritus at NYU and the author of Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning), has spoken in favor of SNAP soda bans, but told me that she finds it “very hard not to look at” Republicans’ current efforts “as a cover for what the real motivation is, which is to cut SNAP.” Soda is unhealthy, but so is limiting food stamps: The program has been shown to significantly reduce food insecurity and health-care costs. Such skepticism is not unwarranted. One advocacy group pushing the current soda bans, the Foundation for Government Accountability, has also been pushing for a number of policy changes that would significantly reduce the number of people eligible for food-stamp benefits. Joelle Johnson, the deputy director for Healthy Food Access at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which advocates for stronger nutrition regulation, told me the group doesn’t support the soda bills, because they could lead to less money for SNAP from the government and are “a veiled attempt to slash SNAP benefits.” Some states are going beyond soda and seeking to ban different kinds of foods; dramatic changes in what people can purchase “sets up the argument to say, ‘Well, if they can only purchase a limited variety of products, then they don’t need as much money in monthly benefits,’” Johnson said.
To some Democrats, the effort to zero in on poor people’s food choices is also cruel. After all, Coca-Cola and Pepsi didn’t become Fortune 500 companies just because people on food stamps like their products. Consider Texas: The state’s soda consumption goes way beyond food-stamp recipients. More than 60 percent of Texans drink at least one sugar-sweetened beverage a day. “There’s real cognitive dissonance when we’re discussing these bills in the back and I’m sitting around with my Senate colleagues and they’re drinking Coca-Cola,” Texas State Senator Molly Cook, a Democrat who voted against the state’s bill, told me.
The situation is such a mess that the two sides can’t even agree on the underlying purpose of SNAP. Proponents of the soda ban are quick to note that the full name of the food-stamp program is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and no one is getting their nutrition assisted via a two-liter bottle of Pepsi. But public-health and anti-hunger groups argue that any food is better than no food. Although the argument seems spurious at first, given SNAP’s name, the program was only renamed in 2008. The original Food Stamp Act, which officially created the program back in the 1960s, was more about reducing poverty than nutrition.
The tension between those two goals is tying some of the nation’s top public-health-advocacy organizations in knots. The American Heart Association originally spoke against Texas’s proposed soda ban out of concern that nutritional restrictions would “interfere with the primary function of SNAP,” which a lobbyist for the group described as “reducing hunger.” But now the group insists its position was miscommunicated. “We look forward to working with states interested in seeking USDA approval to remove sugary drinks from SNAP as they prepare their waiver requests,” a spokesperson told me.
A ban on using SNAP dollars for soda is hardly the most equitable way to deal with the sugary drink; a tax that targets everyone would be fairer. But at this point, given the USDA’s support, red states around the country getting their way and establishing some new limits on what people can buy with food stamps seems like a foregone conclusion. Rather than opposing these efforts outright, Democrats should see them as an opportunity. There’s very little research testing the effects of such a soda ban, so a pilot program would help “identify unintended consequences or questions we will later wish we asked,” Jerold Mande, a former USDA and FDA official who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, told me. Maybe then we can finally get to the bottom of the decades-long debate over whether soda bans are a good idea.