If you’re not “poor enough” to need snap, and you can’t afford to buy whatever food you want, within reason, then either, you need snap and you’re in denial, or you need to learn money management.

There are breakpoints where earning slightly more money can cost you more benefits than you gained in pay. I could also totally see someone being in that range where they're only a little out of range for SNAP and as such have to eat on their own income while someone earning a bit less gets supplemented to a higher total budget than they have.

Snap recipients are forced to spend the money on food, since that’s the only place that money can be spent AFAIK…

I mean without doing shady shit, yeah. But then in lots of places there are known and routinely practiced ways to launder SNAP into cash. One that was popular here for a time a while back was a convenience store that would buy cases of canned soda of specific kinds from anyone who came in with them for less than wholesale price. People on SNAP who wanted to launder it into cash would go somewhere like Wal-Mart, buy cases, go to this store and resell them at a loss to get cash while the store stocks shelves at a discount.