The Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act of 2026 (is a real thing)

Añadido: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Yes. In the midst of all this, the United States Congress is seriously considering a piece of legislation called the Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act.

[00:00:14]I was part of a hot rotisserie chicken act in college. But anyway, this started off as like a standalone bill and now the House has added it as an amendment to this year's farm bill, which means it's probably going to pass. And I guess I'm fine with that. Though I do think the whole thing is a little silly, it'll help some people for sure, but it is little more than a publicity stunt for reasons that I will get to. There is a lot of important stuff we can learn about how government food assistance works by going deep on this silly bill with the silly name. So, let's go ahead and do that. The biggest, but not the only way that we give food to poor people in the United States is through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP. Some old-timers, like me, still call it food stamps because back in the day, the government sent you these physical paper coupons that you could use to buy groceries. They looked like monopoly money, and they came in like $1 or $5 or $10 denominations. You would take those to a store that accepted food stamps, which was a lot of them, but not all of them. And you used it like money, except that it was money that you could only spend on groceries.

[00:01:30]They gave you your change back in more food stamps, or if it was less than a dollar in change, they would give you normal coins. If it sounds like a hassle for everyone involved, that's because it was. Stores basically had to be ready to accept two totally different kinds of currency at all times. And it was really visually obvious to all of the other people waiting in line that you were using food stamps. And it usually took extra time to pay with food stamps, which made everybody behind you in line mad. And everything got better in the early 2000s when we moved to a card-based system, EBT cards, electronic benefit transfer. You use them just like a credit card and the government just fills it up for you every month. The typical monthly benefit is about $200 per person. Even if you are opposed to government social welfare benefits, you have to marvel at the efficiency of the SNAP system, just as you have to marvel at the efficiency of Helix Sleep, sponsor of this video. Helix makes premium mattresses and bedding that are customized for your body and shipped right to your door, rolled up in a box, free in the US. memory foam springs, firm, soft, medium, like the Helix Dusk that we've slept on for years. I was out on the West Coast for a thing this other week, and it is wild how spoiled I am by my Helix mattress. When I'm away, my body aches for it. Literally. Take their quiz to find out which model is right for you and your partner. Also, uh check out the new Comfort Adjust cooling pillow. You make it less firm by unzipping these flaps on the sides.

[00:03:17]Pretty super nifty. Great for guests who might want a particular firmness. Invest in a pillow that you can customize to your body over time. Hit my link or my QR code to save 27% off sitewide with their exclusive Memorial Day partner offer. 27% off sitewide at helixleep.com/regusia right now for Memorial Day. Thank you, Helix. Anyway, even if you are philosophically opposed to social welfare benefits, you have to marvel at the efficiency of the SNAP model in the US. If you want to hand out food directly to the poor, you have to build a whole nationwide supply chain.

[00:04:01]We already have a nationwide supply chain. It's called grocery stores. And so, it's much more efficient to just give poor people money to shop at grocery stores.

[00:04:12]But a complication arises when one considers that grocery stores don't just sell groceries. Grocery stores sell magazines and flower arrangements and cigarettes and little toys they dangle right at grabbing distance for a toddler who is riding in the shopping cart. And depending on the state, some grocery stores sell alcohol.

[00:04:36]These are things that you might not want people to be able to buy with their food assistance for reasons that are legitimate if debatable. So, since the very first federal food stamp program, which goes back to the depression, there have been rules about what you can and cannot buy with your benefits. That very first national program in 1939 was specifically limited to agricultural surplus. That is the crops that US farmers could not sell for some minimum price on the open market. This is why SNAP is to this day administered by the US Department of Agriculture instead of like the Department of Health and Human Services.

[00:05:25]Food benefits in the US double as farm subsidies. Always have by design, just in many different ways. There's this thing that still exists today called the USDA commodity foods program that started out as a way for the government to buy surplus products like milk to stabilize the price for farmers. Use the government as the buyer of last resort.

[00:05:50]And the USDA would process and package these foods and send them out in bulk as a kind of supplement for people who are on food assistance. This is where we get the phrase government cheese.

[00:06:03]Colloquially, it refers to any and all government provided benefits. But etmologically speaking, government cheese is literally a big block of processed cheese made by the government to subsidize the dairy industry.

[00:06:18]Many years ago, I made a YouTube video about a dessert called blueberry yum yum, which is this unholy big bulk dessert where you layer whipped cream with cream cheese and graham crackers and blueberry pie filling. The video featured my old friend Chris, who is hopy. He grew up on reservation.

[00:06:40]Indigenous communities are big recipients of commodity food products.

[00:06:44]And he told me that that dessert was the kind of thing his mom would make to use up all those big commodity blocks and jugs of stuff that they would get sent from the feds.

[00:06:56]Obesity and metabolic syndrome disproportionately afflict native communities in the US. And people sometimes point to the commodity foods program as one causal factor. Remember, it is a farm subsidy as much as it is a food program. And sometimes it makes more sense as a farm subsidy than it does as a food program. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 said that you could use your benefits to buy any food for human consumption except alcohol and imported foods, no imported foods. I suppose that was a bit of protectionism for farmers.

[00:07:35]Effectively, an import tariff doubling as a food benefit. And since the 1970s, the law has in one way or another specified that you cannot use your food stamps to buy hot ready to eat food.

[00:07:51]The benefits are supposed to be for groceries, not for eating out, not for restaurant food. Why? Well, I think this is a policy that probably made a bit more sense in the 20th century when people cooked at home more and prepared foods were generally relatively more expensive than they are now. The prepared food industry is much more scaled up these days, driving down the unit costs. It's still probably cheaper to cook at home if you know what you're doing. But we live in the real world where a lot of generational cooking knowledge has been lost. A lot of generational cooking habits have been lost and poor people are often working multiple jobs outside the home and they don't have time to cook. More than half of households with children receiving SNAP benefits are working households.

[00:08:48]Yes, some SNAP recipients are unemployed, but not all of them. Not by a long shot. And a lot of the recipients who are unemployed are not working age.

[00:08:59]Their kids or seniors or other people who you wouldn't expect to be working, disabled people.

[00:09:06]of the working people on SNAP, a lot of them are working multiple jobs, spending hours a day on the city bus because they can't afford a car, or they can't afford to live in a walkable community, and they live in a food desert where it's not profitable for supermarkets to operate, etc., etc. And you can imagine that a person living that kind of very common American life might need to rely at least some of the time on cheap prepared foods, cheap takeout, at least some of the time.

[00:09:44]But it was perhaps a different world in the 1970s.

[00:09:48]And Congress didn't want people using government food benefits for restaurant foods, which were considered a little more inherently luxurious back then.

[00:09:59]Now, forget for a second whether you agree with that policy. Just ask yourself as a practical matter, where would you draw the line between prepared foods and groceries?

[00:10:13]Are cornflakes a prepared food? I mean, kind of.

[00:10:18]They are ready to eat.

[00:10:21]But cereal is a grocery, right? Why?

[00:10:26]How about a can of soup? It's prepared, but it's a grocery, isn't it?

[00:10:33]The common denominator is that they're not hot, at least not when you buy them.

[00:10:40]Restaurant food is usually served hot to be consumed immediately on site or on the street or as soon as you get home.

[00:10:48]Are there exceptions to this rule? Yes, absolutely. But probably the best simplest way to draw a bright line, a bright legal line between groceries and prepared food is with temperature.

[00:11:05]So if we look at the food stamp language from the 2008 farm bill, which is still in effect now, food that can be bought with your SNAP card is defined as any food or food product for home consumption except alcoholic beverages, tobacco, hot foods, or hot food products ready for immediate consumption. other than those authorized pursuant to clauses yada yada yada. What clauses are we pursuing here? Well, there's a whole bunch of exceptions, mostly for old people, sick people, and homeless people.

[00:11:48]There are carveouts that allow seniors to use their SNAP benefits to buy hot meals from federally authorized vendors, certain contractors, companies that run federally subsidized nursing homes.

[00:12:02]Again, a lot of these things are government subsidies to private sector entities that also incidentally function as food benefits for poor people.

[00:12:15]And even if you aren't covered by an exemption, there are all kinds of workarounds for this hot food ban.

[00:12:24]Convenience stores in poor neighborhoods often have a microwave on site where you can buy a cold burrito or a cold slice of pizza with your snap card and then you can just turn around and heat it up yourself.

[00:12:37]And then there are the chickens.

[00:12:41]Grocery store rotisserie chicken. It's a very popular item in the United States.

[00:12:46]I think it may be the cheapest widely available source of ready to eat protein in our entire food system.

[00:12:54]Grocery stores often sell these birds at a loss, what they call a loss leader in business. They roast the birds inhouse in these big easy to use rotisserie cases. They fill the store with this big delicious smell that brings in customers. the customer buys the chicken, which is very often a chicken from the fresh meat case that was about to expire anyway. And so this is a way for the store to minimize that loss.

[00:13:24]The customer buys the chicken and they're probably not just going to have chicken for dinner. They're they're going to buy drinks and sides at a much better profit margin for the store. And retail is just like gambling in that the house always wins.

[00:13:43]Grocery stores that serve lots of SNAP recipients will often chill some of their chickens down so that they can be bought with EBT cards. And sometimes they'll even have a microwave right there for the customer to heat it back up again. Sure seems like a silly, pointless hoop to make everybody jump through, right? But then again, I would argue that if you want to draw a line between groceries and takeout, you will end up creating some gray zone that people will inevitably exploit. That doesn't mean the rule is ineffective.

[00:14:20]It just means that people are going to bend it a little and that's the cost of doing business.

[00:14:27]If you want to have speed limits, you have to accept that people will go five or ten miles over that speed limit with impunity. You just factor that in when you're setting your speed limits.

[00:14:40]That doesn't mean we have to accept where prior generations of lawmakers have drawn the line between eligible and ineligible foods. Enter the Hot Rotisserie Chicken Act of 2026.

[00:14:55]This single page bill simply inserts the words hot rotisserie chicken into the definition of eligible food products that we just read. That's literally all that it does.

[00:15:10]Hot rotisserie chicken is the only hot item that this bill covers. All other hot foods are still off limits to your typical able-bodied working age SNAP user.

[00:15:23]The bill is sponsored by a bipartisan group of ostensibly centrist legislators, the most famous of whom is Senator John Federman from my home state of Pennsylvania.

[00:15:36]I've watched Pennsylvania politics my whole life. And so Federman's been on my radar since he was the mayor of Bradock.

[00:15:45]Wow, his career has taken some turns.

[00:15:50]We cannot know if his stroke changed his personality, but we do know that strokes sometimes do change people's personalities.

[00:16:01]Federman is thus quoted in his own press release, quote, "America's best and delicious affordability play is Costco's $4.99 rotisserie chicken. It's one of my family's favorites, and I'm proud to join this bill.

[00:16:19]That's a little weird, right? A US senator plugging a specific company's brand.

[00:16:28]But it is true that the $5 Costco chicken is Sue Jenerys.

[00:16:34]I don't think anybody is selling a cheaper chicken on the national level. I got this one at the Food City for $8.99.

[00:16:43]And Costco is as close to a benevolent big box dictator as we have in our corporate community. They pay their people pretty well and they stood up to some corporate coercion from the Trump administration last year when every other big company folded like a cheap suit. #not an ad for Costco.

[00:17:04]So why do I think that the hot rotisserie chicken act is kind of silly?

[00:17:11]Well, for one thing, it only serves a certain kind of poor person.

[00:17:20]A suburban and disproportionately white kind of poor person. That's just where the Costos are. That's whom they serve.

[00:17:31]It's generally not the kind of place that you can take the city bus to. And imagine taking all those bulk goods back home with you on the bus. I mean, I'm sure there are people out there who do that, but it's not the norm. Plus, Costco is a discount club, which means that you have to pay an annual fee to shop there.

[00:17:51]Once this bill passes, most of the other rotisserie chickens that will be bought with SNAP benefits are probably going to be sold at supermarkets, which again often do not serve the inner cities or remote rural areas. So to me, this kind of seems like a bill for John Federman's kind of poor people, if you do take my meaning.

[00:18:17]And it feels a little bit like an electiony year stunt.

[00:18:22]I mean, here I am talking about the Rotisserie Chicken Act because rotisserie chicken act is fun to say and it'll make people click on this video.

[00:18:35]The less token, more meaningful version of this legislation would be something that lets you buy almost any kind of hot food with your SNAP card. And such a bill does exist.

[00:18:49]It's called the Hot Foods Act. It's from Democratic Rep. Grace Mang of New York.

[00:18:55]Her bill will not become law this year.

[00:18:59]Federman's bill about the chickens probably will.

[00:19:04]And I think that is revealing about whom our current Congress serves and how seriously they take their jobs, which is to say not very much. Because while they are throwing the hot chicken bone to their suburban voters, they are simultaneously cutting funding for SNAP by a lot.

[00:19:29]And fewer people are getting SNAP benefits.

[00:19:33]According to USDA data, the number of people getting SNAP benefits dropped by about 3 million, 8% of the total over the second half of 2026.

[00:19:46]Trump's agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, goes on Fox News and touts this decline as an accomplishment.

[00:19:56]She attributes it to a crackdown on fraud.

[00:20:01]She does not have evidence to support this claim, or if she does, she has not presented it publicly.

[00:20:10]Rollins went on Fox the other day and breathlessly announced that in one state alone, 14,000 SNAP recipients also own luxury cars, including Maseratis, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis.

[00:20:27]Her source for this remarkable claim is an analysis of USDA data performed by the Foundation for Government Accountability, an allied conservative group. If you go to this actual report on their website, they do not show their data or explain their methodology very much. It is certainly not at a scholarly level where you can go back and trace every single thing they did to come to this conclusion. One thing about the data that they're working with is that it is anonymized.

[00:21:01]There's no names attached to any of these data points. And so we cannot investigate what's going on with any of these people or even if they are real people.

[00:21:12]Indeed, the authors of this analysis explicitly acknowledge, to their credit, that some of these people on SNAP benefits who own luxury cars may be the victims of fraud, not the perpetrators.

[00:21:27]They may be identity theft victims.

[00:21:30]Somebody used their social security number to buy a car, to hide the asset, or to launder the money or something. We do not know if these SNAP recipients are the same people driving the fancy cars around town.

[00:21:45]All we know for sure is that the USDA has recently made it harder to get SNAP benefits. They've put extra hoops into the process.

[00:21:57]Maybe that has weeded out some fraudsters who did not really qualify for benefits.

[00:22:04]Or maybe this has just discouraged some eligible people from using the benefits to which they are entitled. It's probably both because that's how these things usually go.

[00:22:18]Someone like Brooke Rollins generally doesn't like the idea of people using government benefits when they don't really need or deserve them. And fair enough.

[00:22:31]But the problem is the way you crack down on that kind of thing is with another thing that someone like Brooke Rollins usually doesn't like. And that is red tape.

[00:22:47]More government forms to fill out, more hoops, and a bigger bureaucracy to go over that paperwork.

[00:22:56]And when you make it really complicated to apply for benefits, you end up creating a whole private industry of shady middlemen who help people apply for the benefits. And that industry ends up becoming at least a little predatory.

[00:23:10]And it effectively sucks a lot of the dollars out of the system that were intended to buy poor people food, which is what this is all supposed to be about.

[00:23:21]This is the central paradox of the quoteconservative approach to social welfare programs. The alternative approach is to loosen restrictions.

[00:23:34]The easier you make it for people to get the benefits, the easier you make it on the government to provide the benefits.

[00:23:42]You need less bureaucracy, less red tape for that.

[00:23:47]more of the people's tax dollars go directly to the benefits instead of going to the bureaucracy that administers the benefits.

[00:23:57]Now, the flip side of that is that when you get more permissive, more liberal, you end up giving benefits to some people who don't really qualify for them.

[00:24:11]And maybe that's a price you're willing to pay.

[00:24:15]The cost of doing business.

[00:24:18]At least you're paying for food and not for paperwork.

[00:24:23]Maybe that is the 5 to 10 mph of speeding that you have to factor in when you set your speed limit.

[00:24:32]And maybe that is a naive rosy view of the situation from me, a person who is not an expert in social welfare policy, but I've read a lot of the work of people who are experts in these kinds of things. And a lot of them endorse a more permissive approach for exactly this reason.

[00:24:56]Sometimes the more efficient way to fill the bottle is to let a little spill over the sides.

[00:25:04]This is one of many arguments for replacing most social welfare benefits with a universal basic income.

[00:25:13]Benefits that you pay to literally everyone, not just those who can prove they're poor enough. Because if you give the money to everyone, you don't have to waste any money deciding who gets the money.

[00:25:29]Again, I don't know if that math actually maths. I'm not an expert. I'm just teaching the controversy, as they say.

[00:25:40]Make good choices at the grocery store and in the voting booth, and I'll talk to you next time.