Q: Should food stamp benefits be limited to purchases of "nutritious" foods?
A: Limiting food stamp benefits to the purchase of "nutritious" foods would entail establishing a controversial and cumbersome regulatory process to determine which foods qualify and which do not. Such a process would inevitably be accompanied by intensive lobbying by various food companies and segments of the food industry seeking inclusion of their products on the approved list. The likely result would be a list of acceptable foods heavily affected by political influence. In addition, every time that a new food product came onto the market, it would have to be evaluated and added to either the "approved" or the "not approved" list, with those determinations potentially subject to dispute by the food's manufacturer. Retailers would have to mark all their shelves to let recipients know what they could and could not buy. Finally —- and of particular importance —- such a restriction would require check-out clerks to sort recipients' food purchases at the check-out stand, which would likely cause longer waits in check-out lines and require many food stores to add more check-out lanes and clerks. (EBT systems would provide no help with this task since those systems, like credit cards, only record the amount of each purchase, not what items were bought.) For this reason, the Food Marketing Institute, which represents grocers across the country, has strenuously opposed similar proposals in the past.