U.S. Food Policy housekeeping

First, a warm round of applause for everybody who has been commenting at this site. You turn this work into a memorable conversation.

Second, please let me humbly apologize for the disappearance of the comments to date. Now that Google's Blogger service has implemented backlinks, I have resigned from the HaloScan service I was using in order to consolidate my site management tasks in one place. By switching services, I seem to have omitted existing comments.

Third, I know my posting schedule has been light during the mid-semester crunch. Junior faculty around the country who are also webloggers have been careful with their blogging time, following the denial of tenure to a couple much-admired webloggers, such as Daniel Drezner at the University of Chicago. I should add, though, that I have less cause to fear Dan's particular adventures than some faculty webloggers have. Following his rather distressed post in early October ("So, Friday was a pretty bad day"), I thought to myself that perhaps some universities were less oriented toward dusty journals and more oriented toward the civic engagement and passion for real world communication that Drezner exemplifies. A month later, I was delighted and truly not much surprised when he was offered a position as associate professor at Tufts University, at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy ("So Friday was a pretty good day"). Fletcher has a tenure system, but the Friedman School at Tufts does not. Dan and I have already agreed to go out for a coffee or beer when he gets here. Way to go, Tufts.

Opposition to food stamp cuts delays House budget reconciliation bill

Opposition by moderate Republicans has derailed efforts to cut food stamps for some 300,000 participants as part of the budget reconciliation bill on the House floor. Under this bill, House Republican leaders had hoped to cut more than $800 million from the Food Stamp Program over five years.

Charles Abbott of Reuters reports:

Some moderate Republicans have said they may not vote for a bill that cuts welfare programs. Meanwhile, conservatives complain the bill does not go far enough on energy issues, such as opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

Republicans control the House by a narrow majority and cannot afford to have many party members vote against the bill.

Two anti-hunger groups said they hoped Republicans would abandon the plan to cut food stamps, used by some 25.8 million poor Americans each month to help buy food, according to government data.

The $844 million in proposed cuts would affect 300,000 food stamp recipients and, in a ripple effect, make 40,000 children ineligible for free school lunches.

The Senate's version of a budget-cutting bill would reduce $35 billion in federal spending, but does not touch food stamps or health care to the poor and elderly.

"I'm sure they (House Republicans) are looking at a lot of things," said Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson (news, bio, voting record), the Democratic leader on the House Agriculture Committee. "They're in a real box."

House staff workers said modification or deletion of the food stamp cuts appeared to be a prime topic in efforts by Republican leaders to amass the 218 votes needed to pass the budget bill. One staff worker said some sort of reduction seemed the most likely outcome.

Defenders say this summer's hurricanes showed the value of federal food aid to struggling citizens. Blunt said cuts would "reform the system so you get better results" by sharpening the focus of the program "for the people you intended to help instead of just adding on to the edges."

Meanwhile, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a nice analysis showing that the "SUPPOSED EASING OF HOUSE FOOD STAMP IMMIGRANT CUT TURNS OUT TO BE LARGELY COSMETIC."

The House Rules Committee change would make two modest exemptions to this rule that would apply to limited number of current food stamp recipients. These exemptions, however, would simply result in a phasing-in of this cut over a two-year period. After that period, the full cut would be in effect.

The Rules Committee would exempt from the cut those legal immigrants who both are participating in the Food Stamp Program at the time of enactment and either are age 60 or older or have applied to naturalize for citizenship.[1] Contrary to what some Members of Congress seem mistakenly to believe, the Rules Committee change does not exempt those poor non-elderly legal immigrants with serious disabilities whom the Agriculture Committee provision would disqualify. These people would be terminated immediately.

The Rules Committee change reduces the overall savings from this cut from $275 million over five years to $255 million over five years — a reduction of 7 percent. Thus, some 93 percent of the food stamp immigrant cut remains. This change would reduce the bill’s total food stamp cuts from $844 million over five years to $824 million, a reduction of just two percent.

Detective work uncovers restaurant nutrition secrets

Many restaurant chains hide their nutrition information from the public. Perhaps, with a little detective work, we can offer the nanny-free market-based solution to this information failure. All we need to do is to shine a flashlight in the restaurant industry's darkest cave.

According to this post from CalorieLab Counter, food reporter Rebekah Denn was frustrated that Claim Jumper restaurants would not disclose the nutrition information for their products. So, she bagged a typical meal and shipped it off to a lab for analysis.

Ms. Denn skipped the extras and the monster dishes and simply ordered what looked to her to be an average Claim Jumper entree: the fried chicken dinner, which includes a biscuit and mashed potatoes.

Portland-based Food Products Laboratory reported back the results: 2,032.5 calories, 105.4 grams of fat, and 3,713 milligrams of sodium. The U.S. government daily reference values used in the Nutrition Facts labels on packaged food suggest no more than 2,000 calories, 65 grams of fat, and 2,400 milligrams of sodium for an entire day (these requirements vary by person).

Would anybody like to pitch in and begin a project to continue these investigations? I will be the first contributor.

To be polite -- and to be a good steward of the laboratory expenses -- the project should begin each campaign with a letter to the restaurant chain asking for voluntary disclosure. (We would only do this for major chains with standardized products; nobody wants to bully small restaurant owners). If the information is disclosed, we would file it on a public internet site. Perhaps CalorieLab would volunteer to host. If the information is not disclosed, we would send the food to a laboratory, and then post the information to the same public internet site, along with some graphic icon indicating the special shame of being a restaurant that "hides its nutrition facts from its customers."

A good place to start would be the nutrition information for the Quiznos Steakhouse Beef Dip sandwiches that the federal government supported through a beef checkoff promotion. Then, we could move on to the 3-cheese stuffed crust pizza that the federal government supported through a dairy checkoff promotion in collaboration with Pizza Hut (no, wait, we already reported the nutrition information for that one here).

High-calorie fast food monstrosities promoted by the government are a good place to begin, because there is no laissez-faire argument to suggest that these sponsorships simply respond to consumer demand. But, even moving on to the chain restaurant sector more generally, there is an excellent pro-market case to be made that more consumer information would be better.

Did you know you eat that stuff in nails?

Yeah, real metal carpentry nails. Here is a nice weblog post from Gary King at Harvard, emphasizing the importance of having a control group in social science inference. He says his classroom demonstration works well with students ranging in age from kindergarten kids to graduate students.

To start, I hold up some nails and ask "does everyone likes to eat nails?" The kindergarten kids scream, "Nooooooo." The graduate students say "No," trying to look cool. I say I'm going to convince them otherwise.

I hand out a little magnet to everyone. I ask the class to figure out what it sticks to and what it doesn't stick to. After a few minutes running around the classroom, the kindergardners figure out that magnets stick to stuff with iron in it, and anything without iron in it doesn't stick. The graduate students sit there looking cool.

From behind the table, I pull out a box of Total Cereal (teaching is just like doing magic tricks, except that you get paid more as a magician). I show them the list of ingredients; "iron, 100 percent" is on the list. I ask by a show of hands whether this is the same iron as in the nails. 3 of 23 kindergarten kids say "yes"; 5 of 44 Harvard graduate students say "yes" (almost the same percent in both classes!).

I show the students that the box is sealed (and I have nothing up my sleeves), Then, I open the box, spill some cereal on a cutting board, and smash it up into tiny pieces with a rolling pin. I take the pile of cereal around the room and let the kids put their magnet next to it and see whether the cereal sticks to the magnet. To everyone's amazement, it sticks!

The students are all delighted and now believe that the iron in the food is sticking to the magnet. But, like a good mystery, the story still has two more twists and turns.

King points out that perhaps the cereal is simply sticky, like gum or tape. The graduate students clap their palms to their foreheads and think they have been duped. This gives King the chance to explain the importance of having a control group -- in this case a box of cereal without the iron fortification.

But, in the final twist, the control group cereal fails to stick to the magnet. It really is the iron in the fortified cereal that makes it stick to magnets.

King's moral:

Everyone gets to take home a cool fact (they love to eat the stuff in nails), I get to convey the point of the lesson in a way they won't forget (the central role of control groups in causal inference), and everyone gets a free magnet.

Thanks to the excellent economics weblog Marginal Revolution for the link.

Food Safety and Nutrition Section of the AAEA

The American Agricultural Economics Association (AAEA) has sections -- somewhat like subsidiaries -- on several topics, including a Food Safety and Nutrition Section. This is one of several professional organizations whose work in the borderlands between the main disciplines of economics and nutrition I find most interesting. I will be the chair-elect of this small hard-working group of scholars in the coming year. In this role, I am helping to plan the section's "track" sessions at the AAEA's annual meeting in Long Beach next July. If you have any ideas for symposia or brief scholarly papers on topics related to the economics of food safety or nutrition, please see the call for input on the section website.

Upcoming research on food stamps, food spending, and household food security

USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) recently announced its food assistance research grants for fiscal year 2005. These eight projects will study many topics in food and nutrition assistance, including: the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (Kenneth Finegold at the Urban Institute), recertification policies and Food Stamp Program participation dynamics using administrative data from South Carolina (David Ribar at the George Washington University), the effective tax rates on cash income induced by Food Stamp Program regulations (Jim Ziliak at the University of Kentucky), and a study of how food stamps affect food spending in grocery stores and restaurants, and how food spending in turn affects household food security (Parke Wilde at the Friedman School at Tufts University -- hooooray!). I'll give you an update in several months.

Eric Bost hears recommendations from New England public

Speakers from throughout New England delivered their suggestions for improving food assistance programs in person to USDA Under Secretary Eric Bost, at the Farm Bill Forum in Boston on Friday. Friedman School graduate student Kelly Horton has this report:

There were many common themes between the speakers at the forum, many of which pertained to the Food Stamp Program (FSP).

Several speakers asked that the minimum benefit be raised from $10 – some organizations suggested raising the minimum to $25 while others recommended as much as $50 for the minimum monthly benefit. One speaker suggested that benefit be calculated using the USDA moderate cost meal rather than the Thrifty Food Plan to calculate the benefits. Another speaker suggested that the benefit amount be attached to inflation.

There were many suggestions made for regarding the Food Stamp Program among them included:

• Simplify the application process, i.e. extend the SSI combined application;
• Advertise the option for a face-to-face interview waiver;
• Implement mandatory elimination of face-to-face interviews;
• Increase FSP office hours to increase accessibility and convenience;
• Design a web-based best practices guide;
• Enable beneficiaries to establish their EBT pin codes remotely;
• Expand the farmer’s market FSP;
• Increase the asset limit – some speakers suggested to set the limit at $5,000, while others suggested a $10, 000 limit;
• Increase the housing cap;
• Remove the work requirement;
• Restore immigrant and permanent resident eligibility;
• Develop a system of reciprocity between FSP and the Fuel Assistance Program;
• Preserve categorical eligibility; and
• Rename the program to “Eat Better Today” (based on the EBT card usage).

The food stamp program was not the only program of interest. To provide further support of making changes to the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs, a representative from Mantrose-Haeuser Co., Inc., located in Westport, Conn., spoke about the value of NatureSeal. NatureSeal is a product that was developed in partnership with USDA to help preserve the freshness of sliced apples provided in schools. Several other speakers emphasized the success in providing children with sliced as opposed to whole fruit in school – that children will eat the sliced fruit but will most often discard whole apples and oranges.

Helen Mont-Ferguson, Director Food and Nutrition Services of the Boston Public Schools stated that USDA fails to realize that not all schools are the same – some schools have full kitchens while others receive foods from elsewhere. She went on to say that when fruit was cut up children will eat it but will more that likely not eat it when it is whole. She encouraged USDA to create packaging that is appealing to children, such as providing packages of dried fruits, because children will take them.

A representative from Sunkist Growers spoke on behalf of fruit producers to also encourage USDA to implement program policy changes that would help schools provide healthier meals based on the dietary guidelines, e.g. changing the school menus to reflect an increase in the amount of fruit and vegetables provided in each school meal

The USDA will continue to reviews comments submitted via its website by December 30, 2005.