An Urban's Rural View

The food-stamp program the government launched in 1939 near the end of the Great Depression was as much about helping farmers as nourishing the hungry.

It encouraged the poor to buy the nation's agricultural surplus, mostly fruits, vegetables, eggs, dairy and the like. Uncle Sam specified the foods that could be bought, and chose foods that would both increase farmers' income and improve the public's health.

Today's version of food stamps, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is rather different. SNAP isn't built around agricultural surpluses. If you receive SNAP benefits you can buy pretty much any kind of food you wish, even sugary carbonated drinks. On the SNAP-recipients' most-popular list are processed foods like instant noodles, instant rice and packaged snacks. Not a lot of health benefit there.

And the SNAP program is enormous, feeding 47 million people, nearly one of every seven Americans, at a cost of $80 billion a year, more than double five years ago.

How the healthy-surplus food program of 1939 evolved into what we have now is sketched out in a 2011 essay in the Maine Policy Review (http://tiny.cc/…), "Healthy Food Access and Affordability: 'We Can Pay the Farmer or We Can Pay the Hospital.'" The essay makes the case for redirecting the program, or part of it, to its original purposes.

A turning point in the program's evolution came in 1964. The old food-stamp program had died out during World War II, when food surpluses disappeared, but now Congress was debating a revival. Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois proposed an amendment banning the purchase of carbonated soft drinks with food stamps.

Douglas argued that soft drinks "have no nutritional value -- none at all" and warned that if their purchase were allowed, "this will be used as propaganda against an otherwise splendid and much needed measure." The Senate rejected his amendment. The new food-stamp program became law.

As Congress mulls a farm bill over the coming months, the size and shape of the SNAP program will loom large in the debate. The most vociferous SNAP critics are opponents of big government and deficit hawks. Their goal: Cut, cut, cut.

The strongest SNAP supporters want to hang on to as much as they can amid the budgetary pressure. Limit benefits to nutritious foods? An affront to recipients' dignity, they say, and a step down the slippery slope toward dismantling the program.

In short, for most of the program's critics and supporters improving health and helping farmers are marginal concerns.

Which is a shame, because the authors of the Maine Policy Review essay -- August Schumacher, Michael Nischan and Daniel Bowman Simon -- have some interesting ideas for encouraging the use of SNAP benefits to promote more healthful eating and assist local produce growers.

Nischan is CEO and Schumacher executive vice president of Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit group that's seeding experiments in returning food stamps to its roots. One Wholesome Wave experiment doubles a SNAP recipient's purchasing power if she spends her benefits at a farmers' market.

The lobbyists for the soft-drink industry and the grocers would kill any effort to limit SNAP benefits to foods with actual nutritional value. But there are other ways to redirect the program to promote healthier eating and help local produce growers. As Congress slashes SNAP spending, it might consider devoting a tiny fraction of the savings to spreading experiments like Wholesome Wave's.

(AG)

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