It’s Anything but a SNAP

The United States Department of Agriculture says I’m doing it all wrong. Instead, I should be making a “healthy” snack called a “charger wrap,” which a helpful YouTube video explains starts with gathering up to eight ingredients: romaine lettuce, tomatoes, green pepper, grated cheese, a whole wheat tortilla wrap, lemon juice, black pepper, and cooked chicken breast. Then I’m supposed to cut the chicken into cubes (there is no indication of when or how I was supposed to have cooked the chicken). Next, I am to toss the cubed chicken with lemon juice and black pepper, after which I put it on the tortilla. Then I slice the tomato and green pepper and shred the lettuce, and add all three to the tortilla and chicken. Finally, I sprinkle the grated cheese (which again is magically already prepped) onto the tortilla, wrap it up, et voilà! A healthy snack.

I’ve got three words for the USDA: Never. Gonna. Happen. And apparently I’m not alone. Because the same way I’m not going to follow this too-involved and utterly impractical recipe is the same way recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (the official name for food stamps), the folks for whom the charger wrap recipe was designed, are also not going to follow it. But too complicated is just one of the problems with SNAP and just one of the many reasons to reject the growing public policy drumbeat insisting that what is most needed to correct SNAP’s ills is more taxpayer money.

The importance of SNAP benefits to millions of Americans cannot be understated. In 2011, as reported by the USDA, SNAP provided on average $134 per person to nearly 45 million individuals in 21 million households every month. That’s one in seven Americans. And the numbers aren’t much lower these days. Indeed, reading the USDA’s annual report on SNAP you’d think the government was proud of all the people who need help rather than being focused on lowering the need to participate. As the USDA admits, participation in SNAP was lowest at 17 million in July 2000 when the economy was strongest. Since the recession and weak recovery, participation has skyrocketed to current levels. The USDA trumpets SNAP’s flexibility to shrink when the economy is growing and to grow when the economy is shrinking. And with no end in sight to our current stagnation, the USDA is proud to have an expanded SNAP. The USDA also never misses an opportunity to complain about eligibility reform that lowered the rolls or to cheer the reversals of those reforms, which made signing up easier again.

Who are SNAP recipients? Kids, a lot of kids. Forty-seven percent of all participants are under 18 years old, and about half of all households include at least one child. Single-parent families make up just over half of all recipients, and more than 40 percent of all SNAP participants “live in a household with earnings,” while “20 percent of households have no gross income.” Meaning, there are lots of people who are unemployed who are getting SNAP but lots of others for whom it is truly a supplement to their existing income.

“SNAP households must have monthly gross income less than 130 percent of the Federal poverty guidelines,” the USDA reported in 2012, which equaled just under $30,000 a year for a family of four. According to that same report, the maximum monthly allotment for a family of four was $668. “Nearly 40 percent of SNAP households receive the maximum allotment because they have little or no income,” the report explains.

As important as the program may be, however, the rules are contradictory and the USDA doesn’t make them easy to follow. In a nod toward freedom of choice, there are lots of foods you can purchase with your handy debit-like benefit card, some of which aren’t exactly the basic building blocks for nutritious eating. Juice, soda, candy, cookies, ice cream, and cakes are all eligible for purchase according to SNAP rules.

On the other hand, there is the Thrifty Food Plan, which is in effect a too-stringent mess of rules and categories. SNAP benefits are based on the Thrifty Food Plan, which is meant to guide consumers on how to purchase healthful diets at different cost levels. In the 1920s, the USDA established its first guide for nutritious eating. By the 1960s, those guidelines were officially named the TFP, which began to be used as the basis for food stamp allotments. There are three cost levels: low, moderate, and liberal plans.

TFP isn’t calculated on the basis of cost alone, since that would be too simple. There are 15 baskets divided by participant age groups, for example, 19-50-year-old females or 14-18-year-old males. Each basket is divided among 29 different food categories that make up what the USDA defines as a balanced diet. Thank heaven for small mercies, the categories were recently pared down to 29 from a high of 58. The cost of the TFP is calculated each month to provide SNAP recipients a clear picture of what they should buy and for how much. And the costs assume that all meals and snacks are purchased at stores and prepared at home.

The basis for the nutritional guidelines won’t come as a shock to anyone who has kids in public schools, since the USDA also controls nutrition policy for school lunches. The basic outline is well known. Low fat, little to no salt and sugar, whole grains, some protein, and lots of fruits and vegetables. Though there is disagreement about the importance of fat, and the USDA can get a mite fanatical about sodium and sweets, there is nothing terribly wrong with the outline of the diet. The problem is conforming to the standards at every meal, every day.

In his 2007 study for the Journal of Nutrition, Education and Behavior, “Food Stamps, the Thrifty Food Plan, and Meal Preparation: The importance of the time dimension for US nutrition policy,” Tulane University professor Donald Rose looked at the TFP and found some glaring problems. Taking as a test case a family of four (two parents and two kids), he followed all the component nutritional guidelines and designed two weeks of meals. The goal was a meal plan that “met all nutrient and food component recommendations in the latest Dietary Reference Intakes and in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and met food intake recommendations from the MyPyramid Food Intake Pattern; cost no more than the Food Stamp Allotment; and was as close as possible to actual diets, i.e., to mean consumption levels of these food groups as reported in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.” Already it seems an impossible task. But having done all that, Rose found that the amount of time it would take to prepare all this food, which the food stamp program assumes is going to be prepared at home, was 16.1 hours per week or 2.3 hours per day.

I cook for six people most every day of the week, and I can tell you that while I do spend more time cooking on the weekend than on weekdays, it does not come out to 16 hours a week.

Rose then posed a serious question about rules that produce such a result. “Government policy encourages low-income women to go out and work in the labor market,” Rose explained, “but it provides a food safety net, i.e., Food Stamps for these working poor, assuming they will stay at home to cook from scratch.” Quite a contradiction. And even when looking at the amount of food prep the unemployed do compared with those holding down jobs, Rose estimates, their time in the kitchen is still well below the government standard, 13.9 hours versus 16.1. “For employed women, the divergence between meal preparation reality and TFP expectation is even greater,” he writes. Indeed, the average number of hours spent on food preparation among women who work is 4.5 hours per week. Is the USDA really expecting the 40 percent of SNAP recipients who have some employment to spend four times as long as the average American in food prep?

Having pointed out this important contradiction, however, Rose concludes that this discrepancy between the cooking times demanded by TFP and the cooking time actually available to working women means that “food stamp allotments are too low.” Obviously. Seems it is too complicated for the researcher to even consider the possibility that the program is badly designed and executed.

When two Virginia Tech professors, George Davis and Wen You, looked at the TFP, they also found the time component especially troubling. Their 2010 study, “The Thrifty Food Plan Is Not Thrifty When Labor Cost Is Considered,” published by the Journal of Nutrition, asks why typical SNAP family recipients are failing to meet TFP nutrition guidelines even when they have sufficient resources to eat a healthy diet. Their answer is that when the government fails to calculate the labor cost (i.e., the monetary value of the time it takes to prep and cook the food), the consequence is underestimating the overall cost of eating healthy. “Once labor was included,” they write, “we found the TFP is not very thrifty.” Like Rose, Davis and You found that while following the TFP requires 16 hours per week prepping and cooking the food, the actual amount of labor expended equated to households spending 40 percent less than enough to meet TFP requirements. They conclude that ignoring labor costs provides SNAP recipients with a “disincentive to adhere to the TFP and the accompanying food guidelines and helps explain why many households do not come close to the dietary guidelines associated with TFP.”

At least Davis and You have the decency to conclude that the best way to make the TFP workable for more SNAP recipients is to simplify the meal plans. “One simple and practical policy solution is to develop more labor-efficient recipes that satisfy the TFP,” they write.

Simplification would indeed be very helpful. Really, who takes into account 29 food groups when planning meals? The TFP is based on an otherworldly idea of how people cook for their families, adhered to nowhere outside a government lab. But it’s of course naïve to presume that being helpful to low-income or no-income individuals and families is what drives such programs. Indeed, actual hunger isn’t even the problem being tackled. Instead the problem is “food insecurity.”

As the late pediatrician and infant and child nutrition expert George G. Graham wrote in the Public Interest 30 years ago, “There is little evidence of major or even significant hunger and malnutrition in this country.” Three decades later, good luck finding any hard data that the situation has reversed. Scan the national data offered by the Forum on Child and Family Statistics’ Key National Indicators of Well-Being for 2015 and there is no mention of hunger, malnutrition, or deprivation, only food insecurity. Diseases that in generations past were commonly associated with hunger and malnutrition, such as rickets and scurvy, still occur but are so rare that news stories are written about the unusual cases of adults who suffer from these “18th-century” maladies. In response, the broader, more amorphous category—food insecurity—has been created to keep the need for a safety-net sound like a life-and-death matter.

According to the USDA, 14 percent of American households (17.4 million households) were food insecure at “some time” in 2014. What does this mean? These folks “lacked access to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members.” USDA is especially upset about the “5.6 percent of U.S. households (6.9 million households) [that] had very low food security” in 2014. Severe food insecurity is defined as “the food intake of some household members was reduced and normal eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year due to limited resources.”

The Obama White House joined the act last year when it issued its own SNAP report embracing the complexity and the fog. In its December 2015 report on the long-term benefits of SNAP, the White House argued that current benefit levels are insufficient. After pronouncing SNAP “the cornerstone of alleviating hunger,” the report moved on to food insecurity. “A growing body of evidence suggests that the benefits are, if anything, too low to allow a family to purchase an adequate, healthy diet. One manifestation of this is the fact that the current level of benefits often cannot sustain families through the end of the month—causing children to go hungry and endangering their health, educational performance, and life chances.”

And just last month, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Robert Rubin and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach lobbied for more SNAP benefits on the basis of the alleged understated extent of the food insecurity problem and the labor costs of cooking TFP meals.

It is hard but necessary to remain clear-eyed when digesting these statistics and claims. SNAP benefits are enjoyed by nearly 50 million Americans at a cost of $74 billion of taxpayer money. For that sum and the enormous responsibility of alleviating true suffering, we have complicated menus, contradictory rules, and cloudy definitions of goals.

Abby W. Schachter is the author of No Child Left Alone: Getting the Government Out of Parenting, to be published by Encounter Books in August.