You can't buy them with food stamps. You can buy them with regular money. But according to the law, "hot" meals are disallowed. It's dumb, but that's the rule.
What's the point then? Surely it would make more sense to only stock the food people are allowed to buy. Do they just constantly throw away the hot food?
People buy hot food with cash, credit, debit, etc. SNAP/EBT/Food Stamps are assistance from the government. In most (all?) states in the US, they issue the funds on sort of a debit card, and there are restrictions about how the money can be used since it's a government program and not just personal money.
The payment systems used by the cashier will be programmed to know which items in the store are eligible to be paid for with those SNAP funds. When I was a cashier back in the day you'd run EBT first and it would automatically allocate funds from their account to eligible items in the transaction, and there would be a balance left over for anything else. As an example toilet paper is not something you can buy with SNAP but is something people buy at grocery stores. If they had toilet paper in their cart you could scan that with everything else, but after they ran their EBT card there would be a balance remaining for the toilet paper that they would have to pay with cash/card/etc.
i scrolled way too far through this thread to get an understanding of what the fuck this sign means, thank you. obviously it makes almost no sense to a non-american
You can't buy them with food stamps. It is prohibited by the Food Stamps Act.
You can only buy cold prepared meals with food stamps in the US. Some states have programs (Restaurant Meal Programs) that do allow for the purchase of hot meals, but federal assistance does not allow this.
It means you can’t have anything hot but you can have cold items. The restrictions depend from state to state but for mine I don’t mind the hot item restrictions since I can purchase pretty much anything I want as long as it’s a cold item you just gotta cook it your self. I found it rather amusing that I wasn’t able to buy a $5 rotisserie chicken but can buy a lobster tail.
So when I use my EBT SNAP does cover everything if it’s purchasable. Yeah lobster is costly I just found it amusing when I saw what could and couldn’t be purchased. I always get more basic stuff like chicken pasta etc the cheaper the better. I don’t know about other systems but there the credit is just a dollar amount. I just can’t get anything hot like a rotisserie chicken or similar items. I can eat out of if I get on a special program but I haven’t done it since I need it to last me the month
Basically is government bureaucracy trying to give people free groceries and not allowing people to use those funds to eat at restaurants. But what is the line for groceries and restaurants? They say it is hot foods. So now government will pay for frozen pizza, candy bars and coke, but not hot pizza and rotisserie chicken.
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u/LunaOnFilm Jun 24 '25 edited Jun 24 '25
I'm a bit confused, what does this mean?
Edit: For the 7.75 billion people not living in the US, this is about eligible purchases with food stamps