Hot take: You need a food equivalent of Medicare, where you can walk into the equivalent of a public good supermarket (Aldi would be my example, perhaps adjacent to a library and community center, with a "dine in" meal area), and walk out only with healthy foods or a healthy meal. Regarding food deserts, you need to force the distribution chain where it isn't, even if it isn't profitable (we don't look at the profitability of school lunches, soup kitchens, or food banks, for example).
Citizens also need help understanding nutrition and health diets (existing efforts are woefully inadequate), and direct cash benefits (SNAP) are suboptimal for that, considering food industry marketing efforts (looking at you Coca Cola).
One cannot ban soda (or other unhealthy foods), see what happened with the uproar over choice over a minor tax on soda in NYC. You can not provide it at your establishment though. That's what I'm advocating for; free food (basics or prepared), but only healthy food. Making something difficult to obtain is somewhat equivalent to banning it, without the fight. "Choice" is what got us into the problem of so many having "Western" disease [1] (overweight, pre-diabetes do to diet choices).
Small nudges [2] in the right direction. If I'm providing free meals for those who need it, I'm going to provide water (cheap, healthy, and readily available in the developed world) with it, not a can of Coke.
