CalFresh is changing its eligibility requirements

Author

Carly Heltzel
October 15, 2025

Good morning. It’s Wednesday, and I’m reading about a recent Cal Poly grad who got his payload system onto a commercial spaceplane. Onto the five Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and California stories you need to know for today.

1.

New federal rules could affect Cal Poly students' access to CalFresh benefits a.k.a. the free grocery money that 6,300 students were enrolled to receive as of May this year. Moving forward, students enrolled in only six units are no longer eligible for CalFresh and those enrolled in six to 11 units must work a minimum of 20 hours a week to receive benefits. These new restrictions apply to about 1,000 students at Cal Poly and 7,500 students at Cuesta College students as of 2023. “It’s another barrier for people who need and deserve CalFresh,” the coordinator said.

2.

Cal Poly will build a new farm store in the under-construction Plant Sciences Complex on Highland after Driscoll’s (Yes, the berry people) agreed to pay $5 million to the university to create a “vibrant campus hub for innovation.” Fresh produce will be available for purchase at the farm store when it opens. Construction won’t begin until 2026 but is slated to be finished by 2027.

3.

Starting tomorrow, Pismo Preserve will charge for parking. It will cost $5 for the day or $50 for an annual parking pass. The nonprofit that maintains the preserve ran solely on donations which, recently, have covered only a quarter of its $200,000 operating budget. With around 180,000 guests at the preserve per year, the nonprofit’s leaders decided charging for parking was the best way to generate the cash needed.

4.

Gov. Gavin Newsom just passed first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence guardrail laws that seek to protect children from the harms of AI and social media. A few of the changes are: new harm labeling requirements for minors, banning chatbots from talking about self harm or suicide, banning AI from sharing sexually explicit content to minors and forcing AI to remind users that it is, in fact, a robot and encourage the user to take a break every three hours. He vetoed a bill that would impose a near-total ban on AI for kids.

5.

A day after Newsom signed those AI safeguards into law, ChatGPT’s parent company announced that it was loosening restrictions on content to the point that users could create their own “erotica.” By December, ChatGPT will engage in sexual fantasies with verified adult users, act “in a very human-like way,” treat users like a friend or throw even more emojis into the conversation if that’s what users want.