Poor Taste: Politics of Distinction and Deservingness in the SNAP Program

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 13. Race & Class Politics

Abstract

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest food assistance program in the United States, feeding around 42.7 million people (12.5% of the population) annually (Bosso 2023). Contentious political debates regarding which foods should be eligible for program funds have persisted since the program’s inception as the Food Stamp Plan of 1939. Proposed policy amendments to key program legislation like the 1964 and 1977 Food Stamp Acts attempted to restrict the purchase of “luxury foods,” like gourmet foods, “junk foods”, like soda and candy, and hot prepared grocery items, like rotisserie chickens. Hot prepared grocery items were the only items successfully restricted from the program in 1977, until the recent historic waivers approved by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) allowing 18 states to restrict junk food items from SNAP starting in 2026. In addition to their junk food waivers, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Colorado also requested waivers to allow SNAP recipients to buy hot prepared grocery items, but the USDA stated these waivers were too “complicated” to approve (Swaim 2025).The political and cultural discourse framing the use of SNAP for certain foods as an abuse of the program provides insight into how food acts as a symbol of cultural status, and how access to cultural status can be governed and renegotiated based on perceptions of who the consumer is. While most food consumption scholarship centers around elite status signaling practices (Johnston and Baumann 2015; Bourdieu 1984), limited research has examined the discourse around perceptions of appropriate food consumption for those using government food assistance programs. This paper examines how political discourse regarding SNAP policy waivers seeking to restrict eligible food items from the program reveals broader cultural values of distinction and deservingness for welfare recipients. I develop the concept of cultural debt to theorize how government assistance recipients maintain a negative moral and cultural deficit which they are expected to satisfy through either their relinquishing of rights to participate in distinction or through the expectation of moral consumption.

Author

• Danielle Duran, Northeastern University