Coalition Building and Alliances in Andy Fisher's Big Hunger

In Andy Fisher's ferocious condemnation of anti-hunger organizations -- titled Big Hunger: the Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups (MIT Press, 2017) -- there is much to appreciate.

The book rightly uses a poverty-centered lens to diagnose the causes of food insecurity and hunger in the United States. It skewers a narrow type of charitable anti-hunger work that focuses only on food delivery without looking upstream at the causes of hunger. It provides a perceptive and engaging account of the relationship between national organizations, such as Feeding America and the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), and their regional allies, such as Joel Berg of Hunger Free America. It recounts an array of silly tone-deaf hunger-themed corporate marketing campaigns, such as the Snickers Bar Hunger campaign. It offers an astute history of the cooperative but tense conversation between public health nutrition advocates and anti-hunger advocates about SNAP reforms designed to promote dietary quality.

Still, I doubted the sincerity of the closing chapters' wishes to "foster increased dialogue across the movement" or to build "new alliances" between groups with diverse public interest goals. By and large, this book is a highly public wallop, bloodying the nose of the leading advocacy organizations that have for decades rallied political support for essential U.S. anti-hunger programs. This book makes lively reading, and has some good reporting, but I'll be surprised if it becomes the reading-club book for any constructive cross-sectoral dialogue.

A more constructive approach to SSB restrictions in SNAP

An old debate

First, let me review the harsh back and forth in a somewhat typical week of debate about sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs) in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The New York Times this week published an article about "lots of soda" in the shopping carts of SNAP participants.

This drew fire from the magazine Jacobin ("Reason in Revolt"), where Joe Soss noted several problems with the NYT article. For example, the NYT listed "milk" first among beverage choices for nonparticipant households, but the original USDA study (.pdf) showed no significant difference in the ranking of food choices for participants and nonparticipants.

The NYT reporter, Anahad O'Connor, said "cities, states, and medical groups" have urged changes to SNAP, such as restricting soda purchases. Meanwhile, O'Connor said, industry organizations have spent millions opposing the changes, so USDA has refused to approve the proposals.

One would think from the NYT article that all the good folks favor the restrictions, and all the bad folks oppose. O'Connor didn't say that the list of supporters for such proposals also includes conservative critics of SNAP, who sometimes include such proposals in an agenda that also has budget cuts, nor that the list of opponents includes anti-hunger organizations, who are concerned that the proposals would increase program stigma and food insecurity by discouraging participation among eligible people.

In truth, people who care about poverty, hunger, and health are painfully divided about SNAP restrictions.

A more promising discussion

Second, let's consider a different approach to this policy discussion.

I have a wish that leading anti-hunger organizations would more sympathetically consider supporting a pilot project that includes SNAP restrictions.

Here is a draft set of principles, which, if met, might make such a proposal deserving of support by anti-hunger organizations, legislators who care about food security, and the USDA.

1. the policy to be piloted places a high value on both nutrition and food security, combining a policy of interest for public health nutrition goals (the SSB restriction) with policies of interest for food security goals (such as enhanced benefits for some participants who currently receive too little);
2. the pilot is a true pilot (pilot scale, with genuine empirical curiosity about the outcome, and no assumptions in advance that the outcome will be favorable);
3. the outcomes for the study include reduced SSB consumption (intended outcome) and questions about perceived stigma and SNAP participation (possible unintended outcomes);
4. the pilot policy does not have other food choice restrictions beyond the SSB restriction (no hints at more broadly paternalistic plans to convert SNAP into WIC); and
5. the research protocol has a trigger, enforced by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), ending the pilot in the event of any evidence that the pilot proposal threatens household food security.

I wish such a pilot SSB restriction were not caught up in our poisoned partisan struggle over the safety net more broadly. This is merely a small reasonable revision of the definition of SNAP eligible foods to exclude soda. It is not about "banning" soda, just about altering what can be purchased with SNAP benefits. If the proposed policy turns out to threaten food security, almost everybody in the public health nutrition community would drop their interest in it. And, if the proposal turns out to be successful, and perhaps even popular with SNAP participants themselves -- who may appreciate the health halo associated with the revised program -- then it may merit support within the anti-hunger advocacy community.

Update (Jan 19): A clear and empathetic essay from Marlene Schwartz at the Rudd Center published yesterday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Moving Beyond the Debate Over Restricting Sugary Drinks in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - https://t.co/izCyyf4w7n

— Rudd Center (@UConnRuddCenter) January 18, 2017

A consistent policy toward drug testing for recipients of USDA benefits

Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) this week urged President-elect Donald Trump to allow Wisconsin to implement drug testing for participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation's leading anti-hunger program and the largest program in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

One could argue that this is a bad idea, because people in the grips of substance addictions can be as poor and hungry as anybody else. Moreover, SNAP is a household benefit, so it is not clear how benefit cuts based on one person's drug test would affect innocent children and other relatives in the same family. Remedies other than taking away their food may be the most humane approach to this social problem.

Alternatively, if the incoming administration values drug testing, we can all agree that any drug testing for recipients of USDA funding should be consistent and fair across the board. One could imagine:

1. Drug testing for SNAP participants. In other social safety net programs, evidence suggests that millions of dollars can be wasted chasing very few positives. But, this was Governor Walker's proposal, so it stays on the list.
2. Drug testing for participants in farm subsidy programs. A 2011 study reported: "Current alcohol use, smokeless tobacco use, inhalant use, and other illicit drug use were more prevalent among high school-aged youths living on farms than among those living in towns." To be consistent with the household character of the SNAP drug tests, the testing would certainly include teenagers in the farm families. The Environmental Working Group shows 1995-2014 USDA payments to Wisconsin farmers of $7.6 billion. Surely, only a small fraction of this sum is spent on illegal drugs, but even a small fraction can add up.

One suspects that this consistent drug testing policy would find less support in the U.S. Congress. 

If Governor Walker's proposal fails to gain traction, perhaps Congress will then turn to more imaginative ways of reducing despair and hopelessness, and increasing prosperity and food security, for all recipients of USDA funding.

In 2015, 12.7% of U.S. households were food insecure, and 4.2% of respondents reported hunger

According to the annual USDA report, released moments ago, 12.7% of U.S. households were food insecure in 2015, an improvement from 14.0% the previous year.

Households were classified as food secure or food insecure, based on their responses to a set of questions about food-related hardship.

In 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush administration, the rate of household food insecurity was 14.6%. In 2012, the most recent presidential election year before the current year, the rate of household food insecurity was 14.5%.

Although it is sometimes said that USDA no longer measures "hunger," this is not really true. One of the clearest statistics in USDA's report each year is the simple question (buried deep in the statistical appendix) about whether the household respondent had been "hungry" at some point in the previous year due to not having enough resources for food. Just 4.2% reported hunger in 2015, down from 4.8% the previous year.

Even with the recent improvement, the United States has fallen terribly far short of national goals for improving food security. There is no fundamental economic or physical barrier preventing our country from achieving lower rates of food insecurity and hunger.

Graph by the author. Data source: USDA (2016).

Tufts Research Day 2016: Global food security

The Tufts Research Day is an annual event highlighting inter-disciplinary work on a cross-cutting topic. The 2016 event, on April 25, was titled Research Day on Global Food Security: Crisis and Opportunity. The format was a series of short accessible "lightning talks." My session on metrics and data needs included Tufts faculty members: Colin Orians (biology), Jennifer Coates (nutrition science and policy), and Christine Wanke (public health).

My talk focused on the diverse measurement tools for and policy uses of domestic food insecurity statistics. The conclusion is that there is no fundamental economic or physical barrier preventing us from having much lower rates of food insecurity and hunger in the United States.

What would it look like if Republicans and Democrats worked together to reduce U.S. hunger?

What would federal policy look like if Republicans and Democrats worked together to reduce U.S. hunger?

It would probably look like this new report released yesterday by the bipartisan National Commission on Hunger.

Key features of a bipartisan approach:

• The membership really would be bipartisan. The commission included leading people nominated by the GOP-controlled House (3 Republicans and 2 Democrats) and the Democrat-led Senate (3 Democrats and 2 Republicans). The co-leaders included Mariana Chilton (a professor at Drexel University and director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities) and Robert Doar (a Fellow in Poverty Studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute).
• The diagnosis of the causes of hunger would include comparatively Republican themes (labor markets and broken marriages) and Democratic themes (injustice and lack of program access).
• The recommendations would honor the positive contribution of major nutrition assistance programs, while suggesting new measures to increase their healthfulness (including both incentives and -- notably -- a modest sugar sweetened beverage limitation) and their support for employment effort.

Current anti-hunger policy is characterized by a massive gulf between program critics (treating legitimate anti-hunger functions as equivalent to government waste) and program supporters (treating even small proposed program changes as a matter of life-and-death). Clearly, this commission report is not written quite as a committed anti-hunger advocate would choose. Yet, I much prefer the anti-hunger strategy proposed by this commission to the current state of debate in this country.

Two Pats and patriotism: Striving for a world, country, and communities without hunger

by Ellen Messer

We lost two Pats in 2015. And I’m not talking about season-ending injuries to gigantic players on our favorite New England football team, but about two small heroes in Team America’s fight against hunger.

One, Patricia Kutzner, founded the World Hunger Education Service and its newsletter, Hunger Notes. Over the period 1975 through 1995 she produced background materials, ran workshops, established a clearinghouse of organizations, and helped stimulate official and community actions against hunger by making sure everyone had information about the problems and the stakeholders in America’s War on Poverty and hunger. A Quaker, who worked closely with inter-denominational Christian and interfaith organizations, she helped shape national advocacy against hunger and for human rights, then dedicated her final twenty years to consulting for the Navajo Nation, as they ramped up their community agencies and services. Her many contributions are remembered and memorialized in Lance Vanderslice’s tribute in Hunger Notes.

The second, Patricia Young, served as the American coordinator for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s World Food Day, from 1981 through 2010. As background to this position, she brought years of civic-leadership experience, having served in an array of community, regional, national, and international capacities, expansively addressing education, civic responsibility, corporate responsibility, and government obligations to end hunger and injustice. Presbyterian, inter-denominational Christian, and inter-faith mobilizations against apartheid and hunger contributed important moral and structural contexts at home, in the nation’s capital, and in Rome. In recognition of her actions that helped transform America’s responses to hunger, she was awarded the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Prize for Public Service.

Like the first Pat, working with these agents of change, she encouraged mobilizations at every level against hunger by championing civil and human rights at home and in the world. In both cases, their lives of action demonstrate that true democracy means challenging society and government to pay attention, to address hunger and injustice and protect human rights, in all forms and at every scale. Both life stories testify that each and every citizen can make a difference; they show that democracy can work, and only works, when individuals courageously take or create such possibilities.

As Americans reflect on patriotism in this new year’s season of Presidential hopefuls, let voters remember the gigantic efforts of these two true patriots who confronted the violence of racial discrimination and hunger with courageous actions. Can their successors maintain such momentum in this age of virtual representations, religious posturing, and diversionary social media?

Note: Biographical information taken from Hunger Notes and obituary in Scranton Times-Tribune.

Ellen Messer is affiliated faculty at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

A conversation with Project Bread

I enjoyed a recent interview with Project Bread, a leading anti-hunger organization in New England and organizer of the annual Walk for Hunger in Boston.

What is the biggest cause of food insecurity in the United States?
There are multiple reasons why people lack sufficient income to meet their needs, and multiple reasons they go hungry. Some young people who want to work might not have a job because the unemployment rate is high, or there are no jobs availble to them at their skill or education level. Others might fall into poverty because of a medical conditions: they're too sick or injured to work, and they have major costs to cover. They may have a disability that keeps them from having access to the services and support they need. They might be older and isolated in their homes. This is why no one solution fits everyone everyone who is food insecure. ...

Are things getting better?
Some would say that at least they aren't getting worse, but we still have more than 14% of families facing food insecurity. We need to remember the goal of 6% that we set before, and figure out how to get there. Even though our economists tell us we're in a period of economic expansion, we're still not seeing the rate of food insecurity drop.

What is this grain but blood and bones?

Recently, the Real Food Real Talk site asked several other writers and myself to answer briefly, "What does food justice mean to you?"

Much harder hitting than our answers, though, is this fierce reflection from the medieval poet Deschamps, written in the 14th century at a time when a popular working-class uprising had just been cruelly suppressed by the nobility.

"Therefore the innocent must die of hunger with whom these great wolves daily fill their maw," wrote Deschamps. "This grain, this corn, what is it but the blood and bones of the poor folk who have plowed the land? Wherefore their spirit crieth on God for vengeance. Woe to the lords, the councillors and all who steer us thus, and woe to all who are of their party, for no man careth now but to fill his bags." 

From In a Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman.

With little progress against poverty, U.S. household food insecurity remains above 14%

The prevalence of household food insecurity in the United States remained above 14% in 2013, according to new data released today by USDA's Economic Research Service.

Here is the abstract to today's report:

An estimated 14.3 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2013, meaning they lacked access to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The change from 14.5 percent in 2012 was not statistically significant.The prevalence of very low food security was essentially unchanged at 5.6 percent.

Household food insecurity means that some household members at some times of the year experienced food-related hardships (the household respondent gave 3 or more "yes" answers to a set of 18 survey questions about experiences of hardship).

The high rate of household food insecurity represents a major disappointment for U.S. anti-poverty policy. Rates of household food insecurity fell during the economic expansion of the 1990s, stagnated in the early 2000s, and rose dramatically during the financial crisis of the late 2000s. Despite hopes for renewed economic growth and reduced unemployment, these remain very difficult times for low-income Americans.

In previous years, the United States solemnly adopted targets for reducing the prevalence of food insecurity from 12% (the level observed in the mid-1990s) to 6%. As my chart (based on USDA data) shows, this effort to improve U.S. food security has failed. Yet, neither Democrats nor Republicans talk much any more about any substantial realistic strategy for poverty reduction -- with serious objectives, quantitative targets, and implementation steps. Though food assistance is of course important, poverty reduction is the most promising approach to improving household food security in the United States.

New edition of Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat by Janet Poppendieck

Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat is a classic in the history of U.S. food policy, written by sociologist  Janet Poppendieck, focused on the connections between agricultural crisis and food programs for the poor in the Great Depression.

The new edition from the University of California Press, published this month, includes a foreword by Marion Nestle and a delightful new epilogue bringing the story up to date from the book's original publication in the 1980s to the present. And by "the present," I mean the book includes material as recent as the key January 2014 compromise over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provisions new Farm Bill. (In terms of the publishing mechanics, how is this even possible?).

I read the new manuscript last year at the request of the publisher (and recommended republication):

The book is well-written and detailed, making bureaucratic correspondence come alive as lively argument. It has an authoritative and believable voice, while still carrying passion for the plight of the poor and hungry. I knew this already from reading Poppendieck’s more recent books on the emergency food system and on school meals reform. The pig slaughter story will stick in my head permanently now. The use of archival material adds novelty, but the book serves well even digesting and interpreting known topics.

Immediately today I will add this book to my U.S. food policy syllabus and place an order request to my university library.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) to speak on food stamps and hunger at Tufts April 11

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) will give the keynote speech Friday April 11, 4pm, at a Tufts University conference titled "Food Stamps and Hunger in America."

The event is part of the annual "Issues of the Future" conference organized by Tufts Democrats. Rep. McGovern is a leading advocate in Congress on behalf of U.S. nutrition assistance programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Chapter 10 in Food Policy in the United States addresses "Hunger and Food Insecurity," including links to many other readings and data resources. On this blog, related material can be found under the tags for SNAP and hunger. For example, a 2011 data visualization shows how SNAP participation ebbs and flows with the changing macroeconomy.

Bread for the World publishes 2014 Hunger Report

The faith-based anti-hunger advocacy organization Bread for the World today released its 2014 report on Ending Hunger in America.  This organization stands out for its economically sensible poverty-centered approach to thinking about the problem of hunger. 

It is right for such an organization to press for greater generosity in federal nutrition assistance programs (as Step #3 out of 4 steps).  But it also seems wise for Bread for the World to give jobs and education their proper place (as Steps #1 and #2). 

The #1 plank has the tag-line: "The best defense against hunger is a good job."

Should food policy be part of the Farm Bill?

In presentations at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on October 23, Neal Hooker and Jill Clark will address the question, "Should food policy be part of the Farm Bill?" (free event, but with registration).  Neal and Jill teach at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University. 

The event will address the political dynamics that historically led both urban and rural legislators to support combining farm policy and food policy in a single omnibus Farm Bill.  As this blog discussed in July, the consensus in favor of a single bill has been falling apart this year.

In a visit to Ohio this week, I enjoyed speaking to student and community audiences at the Glenn School and at Cleveland State University.   The website for the food policy programs at the Glenn School also currently has posted a nice presentation on local food by my Friedman School colleague Christian Peters.  Chris' intense interest in local food, combined with realism and quantification, is appealing.

At Cleveland State University, I visited with students and faculty involved with the Academic Association for Food Policy Research (AAFPR) (site and Facebook), which seems to have a lively event series including regular discussions of documentaries related to food policy.  The organization brings together folks from the university, local food, and anti-hunger organizations in the Cleveland area.  The advisory group includes Michael Dover (Social Work, CSU), Michelle Kaiser (Social Work, OSU, and Food Innovation Center), Mary Waith (Philosophy), and Dana Irribarren (CEO, Hunger Network of Greater Cleveland).

WIC benefits for low-income mothers, infants, and children expected to stop during government shutdown

USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) has posted a document explaining the contingency plan (.pdf) for nutrition assistance in the likely event that the federal government is shut down this week.

In the document, the major nutrition assistance program most in jeopardy appears to be WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.  Except in cases where states have some state-level money in hand, WIC participants may stop getting benefits in October.  

It should be noted that WIC has long had bi-partisan support, including heartfelt support from leading Republicans.  The program provides a targeted package of selected nutritious supplemental foods, not a general food subsidy.  The program provides no support for adults without children -- for example, no support whatsoever for single men who could be out getting a job.

By contrast, the SNAP program appears to be funded in October even with a shutdown, because it is mandatory spending.  And school meals programs appear likely to continue in October because of the way the program expenses are reimbursed, as the contingency plan explains.

Niraj Chokshi has a brief report this week at the Washington Post.

I wish those in Congress who seek this government shutdown would relent.  Surely there are better ways to make a good point about small-government virtues or the best design of market-oriented health insurance programs.

Why it is difficult to develop good SNAP policy

When legislators want to make cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), they don't write in a change to an appropriated dollar amount.  Instead, because the program is a "mandatory" or entitlement program, they change the eligibility and benefit rules in some particular way, and then the Congressional Budget Office "scores" the change to provide an estimate of the budgetary change that is generated.

When House Republicans proposed this summer to cut SNAP, the particular legislative vehicle was a proposal by Rep. Steve Southerland (R-FL) to increase work requirements.  Democrats opposed the change, not so much because of an objection to work requirements, but rather because the proposal was first and foremost the vehicle for SNAP cuts.  In the past, proposals for work requirements that weren't about cutting program rolls have sometimes had broad support and sometimes not.

In the Washington Post today, Eli Saslow has an excellent feature about Southerland and his interest in work requirements.  The article has two especially captivating passages.  The first passage is a conversation between Southerland and low-income participants in a job readiness program.  I sometimes read a promising reform proposal from a constituency that is not traditionally a core program supporter (whether budget-cutting conservatives, or whether nutrition-promoting public health advocates) and think to myself, "This promising proposal certainly could be strengthened if the sponsors would first vet it with program participants themselves, then make some modifications so that the proposal really could be even more relevant to people's needs, rather than just what an outsider thinks they need."

The second captivating passage is about how Southerland, though he has the courage to speak to program participants, lacks the ability to speak to program supporters in Congress:

He explained that he had spent the past few days studying 20 years of food stamp policy, trying to differentiate himself from his colleagues by becoming an expert. “Nobody here really knows anything,” he said. He thought about that for a second and then reconsidered. “There’s one other guy,” he said. “A Democrat.” He told her about a Massachusetts liberal named Jim McGovern, who had been giving a speech about hunger on the House floor each week. McGovern had rallied the Democrats against Southerland’s proposal. Out of 435 people in the House, he was the only one who had studied food stamps just as hard and who seemed to care just as much.

“What does he say about all of this to you?” his daughter asked. “I don’t know,” Southerland said. “I haven’t talked to him.”

“What?” she said. “Seriously? Never? That doesn’t make sense.” She knew her dad as a conciliator who valued mentoring young men at church, yearly hunting trips with his three siblings and funeral director retreats to the mountains. “Your whole thing is connecting with people,” she said.

“Everybody likes you.” And yet here was another Washington lawmaker, elected to solve the same problems, who had become an expert on the same issue, who worked in the same place, and her dad had never met with him?

“Can’t you ask him to coffee?” she asked. “You could work together.”

“That wouldn’t play so well with the conservative base,” Hayes said.

“Or back in district,” McCullough said.

“Honey, look,” Southerland said, staring at her intently, pleading with her to understand. “Washington is a runaway freight train. There isn’t time here for anything.” He reached for two empty milkshake glasses to help him illustrate the problem, setting the glasses side by side on the table, their rims touching. “This is me, and this is the other guy when we get to Washington,” he said. “Different ideas, different people, but we are close. We are touching. Democrat and Republican. We can do something with this.”

He started to slowly pull the glasses in separate directions, ticking off reasons for the escalating divide. “Fundraising. Campaigns,” he said, moving the glasses farther apart. “Votes, strategy, rushing around, lobbyists, name-calling,” he continued, spreading the glasses farther, moving his daughter’s plate to clear a path for one of them. “I have my meetings and they have theirs. I run by them. They run by me. It’s all about winning, winning, winning. Winning – not fixing problems – defines all.”

Now Southerland stretched his arms as far as he could, placing each glass at a distant edge of the table. Each was just an inch from falling and shattering on the ground. This was the congressional divide over food stamps and so much else. This was Washington in 2013 – one place, Southerland was beginning to realize, where legislation depended on so much more than hard work.

“So now I’m here and they’re way over there,” he said, pointing to the glasses. “We can barely see each other. We can’t solve anything like this.”

This totally matches my own impressions about what is going wrong in Congressional politics in the United States on all the important food policy issues of the day.

I want to shout, "Take a risk, Mr. Southerland!"  You are thinking clearly about important issues.  You are getting out in the field to speak to real people.  Why, then, restrict your policy conversations to government-hating anti-poor conservatives in the majority caucus of the House of Representatives? Perhaps you have a calling in educating and persuading instinctive liberals about a genuinely helpful vision of a social safety net that gives an honored central place to hard work.

Mark Winne discusses SNAP reform

Long-time anti-hunger and community food security activist Mark Winne has a new essay on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).  Winne is passionate about protecting the program from the deep cuts proposed in the House of Representatives and eloquent about the hardship SNAP participants face in these hard economic times.

And yet, Winne includes the following strident call for reform and improvement of SNAP:

Whether we have more food stamp spending or less begs the question of why such a major act of social policy that nobody, including the recipients, seems to like, continues unreformed and unevaluated. With a national poverty rate locked at 15 percent and a near-poverty rate bringing the combined numbers to well over 30 percent, food stamps provide some relief but no solutions. With overweight and obesity affecting 65 percent of the population and eclipsing hunger as America’s number one diet-related health problem, food stamps do little to encourage healthy eating and less to discourage unhealthy eating. And with high unemployment, low wage jobs, and few prospects for growth – other than big box stores and casinos – leaving the economy stuck in neutral, food stamps $70 billion in federally generated buying power helps Kraft Foods (food stamps are 1/6 of its sales), but nearly nothing to infuse local economies with new energy.

But the anti-hunger orthodoxy that SNAP is a vital part of the nation’s safety net and must never be altered goes unchallenged. Whenever an innovation is proposed, e.g. Mayor Bloomberg’s request to prohibit the use of food stamps to purchase sugary soft drinks, the program’s pit bull defenders bare their teeth threatening to rip the limbs off heretics who might modify even one of SNAP’s holy sacraments. It may be that they are in bed with Wal-Mart and others who have tragically dumbed-down American wages and whose workers are subsidized by the food stamp program, or it may be that they are riveted to the notion that they are all that stand between a modicum of food sufficiency and mass starvation. Either way, the tenaciousness of their enterprise, which opposes food stamp change at any cost, is only matched by an equally fervent brand of conservatism embodied by the Tea Party. The result: A program now more than 50 years old remains largely unchanged even though the nation that it helps feed has changed in myriad ways.

Imagine a corporation or major private institution that did not conduct research and development, kept the same product line for generations, and never engaged in strategic thinking. That enterprise would be out of business (or subsidized by the federal government).

It's something to think about.

Like Winne, I think it would be fine for USDA to use its existing authority to permit pilot innovations that would change the definition of "food" under SNAP to exclude sugar sweetened beverages such as soda. The New York City proposal was designed to appeal only to public health nutrition advocates and did not do well at building bridges with anti-hunger advocates.  Yet, I think both public interest traditions should support such a pilot.  The anti-hunger advocates say the proposal is stigmatizing, but I see no evidence that SNAP participants actually would mind.  Remember, low-income parents, just like all parents, work hard to choose healthy foods in a rough marketing environment, and they may find the restriction helpful as they discuss food and beverage choices with their children in the aisle of the grocery store.  Congress has to draw the line between "food" and "non-food" somewhere, and it makes sense for USDA to use pilot studies to help Congress figure out the best way to do so.  If the pilot finds that the proposed reform increases stigma, reduces program participation, or damages food security, the proposal should be dropped.  But, quite possibly, the opposite will happen.  Anti-hunger advocates may be stuck in the way things have always been, overlooking an opportunity that could be appealing to program participants and politically popular with the public at large.

I once interviewed Winne for this blog, shortly after he wrote his book, Closing the Food Gap.  Winne's new book is Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas.

Graeme Wood in the National Review on U.S. hunger

Graeme Wood writes in the National Review June 3 (gated, but inexpensive) about hunger in the United States.

Wood argues that the new documentary, A Place at the Table, overstates the extent of hunger.  Citing recent research by Hattori, An, and Sturm, Wood casts doubt on claims that food deserts are widespread or that they cause overweight.

Then, the later sections of the article draw on an interesting wide-ranging telephone conversation Wood and I had about the connections between hunger and poverty.  Wood quotes me saying food insecurity is not really just about food, but largely about poverty:

Wilde, the Tufts professor, says that we could theoretically just pay for the missing and potentially missing meals of the food-insecure, for a price of a few billion a year. But if you think, as he does, that the problem will persist as long as poverty does, then this solution won’t be enough.

“With the food-centered approach, the common theme is If only we had the heart,” Wilde says. “But hunger is a more daunting problem.” Whatever you think can be done to make people richer (tax cuts? tax increases?), that’s probably going to be your best guess about how to get rid of hunger. But given that we can’t agree on how to end poverty, we probably shouldn’t assume that the solution to hunger is any simpler.

In pursuing a poverty-centered approach to understanding hunger, I'm influenced by Mark Winne and Janet Poppendieck.  It could make some readers uneasy to see these ideas make their way to the National Review, where the predominantly conservative readership may receive these themes in a different key from their original transmission.  But, it doesn't bother me.  I am glad to see both conservatives and liberals thinking seriously about U.S. poverty.  And I talk to anybody.

See for yourself

In a class session on hunger measurement each fall, I advise not relying on statistical measures alone.  These measures are important, but it also is valuable to "see for yourself," by visiting anti-hunger efforts on the ground, getting to know all neighborhoods in your community, participating in activities that involve people from diverse income backgrounds, and basically by living life in an unsheltered way.

Perhaps Betsy Comstock and Carolyn Pesheck were thinking of something similar when they decided to spend the first part of their retirement years working in at least one anti-hunger program in each of the 50 states.  I enjoyed meeting Betsy last week and hearing about this ambitious undertaking.

Food stamp cycle in the Washington Post

The Washington Post this weekend published a long and thoughtful feature by Eli Saslow titled: Food Stamps put Rhode Island town on monthly boom-and-bust cycle.

At precisely one second after midnight, on March 1, Woonsocket would experience its monthly financial windfall — nearly $2 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. Federal money would be electronically transferred to the broke residents of a nearly bankrupt town, where it would flow first into grocery stores and then on to food companies, employees and banks, beginning the monthly cycle that has helped Woonsocket survive.

For research background, my dissertation in the late 1990s and the resulting article with Christine Ranney in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics provided the first nationally representative estimates of the monthly cycle in food spending and food use for food stamp program participants.  My 2002 article with Margaret Andrews in the Journal of Consumer Affairs used Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) data to get an even sharper view of the exact timing of food stamp and cash transactions over the course of the month.  In 2005, Jesse Shapiro provided more economic insight in the Journal of Public Economics.  In a 2012 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Harvard researchers Cindy Leung, Walter Willett, and Eric Ding recommended further research on whether the monthly SNAP cycle could be related to risk of overweight.

One policy-relevant question is whether the federal government should ever consider providing benefits twice monthly.  Michigan considered such a policy in 2008, but I think it never came to pass.

One objection I have heard is that twice-monthly benefit delivery is paternalistic and might force low-income SNAP to conduct a potentially burdensome shopping trip.  This argument seems incorrect to me.  Let me lay out the case in an orderly fashion.

Whether benefits are delivered once or twice monthly, SNAP participants can freely choose whether to shop once or twice monthly.

• If benefits are delivered to the EBT card once monthly, then a SNAP participant who wanted to shop once monthly is perfectly satisfied, but a SNAP participant who wanted to shop twice monthly and smooth consumption over the course of the month must save half the benefits for use two weeks later.
• If benefits are delivered to the EBT card twice monthly, then a SNAP participant who wanted to shop once monthly must save half the benefits for use two weeks later, but a SNAP participant who wanted to shop twice monthly and smooth consumption over the course of the month is perfectly satisfied.

The key point is that the two policies are exactly equally paternalistic.  When middle-income speakers say that twice monthly benefit delivery is paternalistic, they implicitly assume that it is most natural for low-income people to shop once monthly and go hungry later -- a shopping pattern that the middle-income speakers would never use themselves.  I think it is the middle-income speaker's implicit assumption that really is paternalistic.

Any policy such as twice-monthly benefit delivery should be pilot tested.  The pilot should explicitly ask SNAP participants whether they had any shopping difficulties or budget difficulties, and whether they liked the new policy better than the old one.  It is possible that the new policy will reduce the occurrence of episodes of food insecurity at the end of the month.  The current policy should not be preferred based on implicit assumptions. SNAP participants deserve an influential voice in this decision.