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I’d be ok with SNAP regulation that says welfare can only be spent on raw unprocessed foods: fruits vegetables nuts meat milk eggs fish rice beans flour sugar and salt. Maybe dried pastas and loaves of bread, coffee and tea. Beyond that what does one need to live for food?

You're exactly right.

It is absolutely true that food you cook yourself from scratch is much healthier than Campbell's chunky soup, Dinty Moore beef stew, or a Jimmy Dean breakfast bowl. Which is why that sort of quasi-junk food is found in our house only on the "power failure emergency rations" shelf.

Now if the fedgov was really concerned about health, the EBT cards would disappear, and welfare recipients would go to a government warehouse to pick up their weekly allotments of fresh vegetables, raw grains, and dried beans.

But I'm not holding my breath waiting for this. Too bad in a way, I would be able to wait outside the warehouse parking lot and get all the veggies I could eat, just by trading a 40 ounce or a coupla packs of smokes.

I'd be okay with SNAP regulations that say welfare can only be spent on raw unprocessed foods.

Where that might do the most good is school cafeterias where the students get their breakfast, lunch, and healthy snack for free. A lot of them serve processed foods instead of cooking up a healthy meal.

For truly poor people (which the gov knows nothing about) fresh foods aren't a real good option. Many don't have proper refrigeration or even storage if they're truly poor and don't even have decent housing. Many live a distance from a good well stocked grocery store, so get to the store less than once a week. There are good processed foods without additives and made with fully ripe fruits and veggies. They're more likely to be healthy than preparing foods in unsanitary conditions would be.

I did a "food stamp challenge" last autumn. FWIW, there are healthy, traditional, very reasonably priced canned foods that are good choices. If you're truly poor, you can't take the economic risk of fresh food or leftovers going bad.

I’d be ok with SNAP regulation that says welfare can only be spent on raw unprocessed foods

Didn't it used to be that way, that food stamps could only be spent on certain foods?

Since most of the recipients don't work, they have the time to prepare healthy meals using those fresh ingredients. I'd love to have the time to prepare all of my meals from fresh, raw ingredients.