For more than half an hour, Canales listened to their concerns about his bill and another proposed by a lawmaker who wanted to eliminate candy and chips: Should government really be in the position of telling adults what to eat? And if so, who would be trusted to sort through the 40,000 items sold in a typical grocery store and divide healthy from unhealthy? If energy drinks were banned, why not also ban canned iced coffee that has twice the caffeine and triple the sugar? Or Sunny D fruit drink? Or Gatorade? Or fruit punch? And once every product had been rated and sorted, what if some grocery stores decided it was easier not to accept food stamps at all? Or what if food-stamp recipients felt too stigmatized to shop?
Wouldn’t lawmakers be better off working to solve the problems of poverty rather than regulating them? How about funding programs for nutrition education, or encouraging more fresh produce in inner-city grocery stores, or building playgrounds and making streets safer so people would exercise? Why not focus on alleviating the stresses of poverty, which so many studies had linked to overeating?
“It is unrealistic to expect someone stretching their dollars to be highly worried and focused on nutritional content,” one food policy analyst testified. “They just need to eat.”
The committee meeting ended without a vote on Canales’s proposal, and suddenly he, too, felt a little less sure. He did nothing to resurrect his bill over the next weeks, deciding instead to raise money for diabetes awareness and nutrition education.
“The more you learn in this job, the more complicated it gets to take a position,” he told his district director one evening a few months after the committee meeting.
“What do you want to do about it, boss?” the district director asked.
“I don’t ever want to pass a bill and end up regretting it,” he said. “Let’s teach people to make good choices and go from there.”