This week, the Senate and House committees in charge of agriculture passed farm bills—mammoth bills that will last for five years if passed and signed—and sent them to their chamber floors. The bills handle farm policy, but the vast majority of their spending goes to a program that has proven a rich target for a Washington drunk on spending cuts—the food stamp program. The House bill would lower benefits across the board, cutting a fourth of the program’s $80 billion budget. The Senate bill would trim $4.4 billion from food stamps. Many of the cuts in both bills come from getting rid of a program that allowed states to streamline the ways they provide assistance to the poor.
Something happened today that, chances are, you know little about yet care about very deeply. It helps pay for the lovely farmers market you frequent every weekend. It’s behind all those corn-syrupy soft drinks you’ve been taught to avoid. It’s the reason you started hiking to that one artisanal shop for grass-fed beef after you read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It helps feed America’s hungry, because it authorizes the federal food-stamp program, which feeds 46 million people. It’s the farm bill, usually the concern of only the corn, wheat, cotton, peanut, and soy-bean lobby, but it really should be called the food bill, and it has to be reauthorized every five years.
A reader offers some additional context on whether restricting food stamp purchases is necessary to ensure healthy eating on part of recipients:
On food spending among food stamp participants: there is evidence that food stamp receipt does alter how households spend their money on food. Journal article here and ungated report here.
Mark Bittman is apparently a fan of Republican state senator Ronda Storms, who wants to prevent food stamp recipients from buying junk food:
When she introduced a bill to prevent people in Florida from spending food stamps on unhealthy items like candy, chips and soda, she broke ranks: few of her party have taken on Big Food. […]
Yet she makes sense. “It’s just bad public policy to allow unfettered access to all kinds of food,” she told me over the phone. “Why should we cut all of these programs and continue to pay for people to use food stamps to buy potato chips, Oreos and Mountain Dew? The goal is to feed good food to hungry people.”
In October 2008, Michael Pollan, a food writer and critic of American agriculture policy, wrote a letter in The New York Times Magazine addressed to the president-elect, whom everyone then assumed would be Barack Obama, on how to make our food more healthful. Obama wouldn’t win the election for another month, but the lithe, urbane candidate had earned a reputation for eating well on the campaign trail; he eschewed hot dogs for salmon, arugula, and Honest Tea. Food policy had not been at the forefront of the campaign, Pollan argued, but was key to a number of policy goals Obama had raised: “Unless you [reform the food system], you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.
Yesterday, the House and Senate released their final appropriations bill for the current fiscal year. Like the House bill passed in June, the bill, which provides funding to the Department of Agriculture, cuts a number of programs. The National Sustainable Agriculture coalition discusses the programs most hurt in a detailed blog post. One of the areas most hurt is conservation: On the whole, programs that help preserve land were cut by almost $1 billion.
Ronald Baileyresponds to the evidence that calorie labeling doesn't really affect people's eating choices and mocks "food nannyism," writing, "Nannies always know best and they never give up."
Earlier today, Paul Waldmangot into some specifics about what the Republicans' budget proposal would cut over the rest of this fiscal year. It includes cuts to local police-department programs, FEMA first responders, and community health centers -- all things people like.
Tim Fernholz, whom you'll remember from his Prospect days, reported at the National Journal today that the House Agriculture Committee has endorsed a cut to the food-stamp program, known as SNAP. SNAP is dealt with within the USDA, and the committee likely wants to deflect potential cuts to direct-payment programs made to farmers, Fernholz notes. President Obama and others have endorsed cuts and reforms to the subsidies program as a way to curb spending, but some of the representatives on the committee likely have wealthy constitutes who benefit.
Slatelisted the winners of a contest today to find new ways to tackle childhood obesity. The winning idea was holding companies accountable for the way they market food to kids. About a year ago, I went to a media literacy conference with educators and advocates who spent their time trying to find the best ways to teach their students to read the messages sent to all of us, nonstop, through a variety of mediums. One of the biggest thing nearly everyone there agreed on was that the way food companies advertise to children is particularly exploitative and should be curbed.
I don't know how robust the study is, but according toThe Guardian, young children fed a diet high in processed foods have lower IQs, and those effects persist even if they begin eating more healthfully later. (ViaJezebel.)
The Senate just passed an overhaul of the country's food-safety laws, a long-overdue modernization that, perhaps most important, increases inspections and gives the FDA the power to enforce recalls instead of relying on companies to do them voluntarily. But the safety legislation still takes as a given a large-scale agribusiness industry and doesn't deal with the problem caused by the fact that oversight of meat and non-meat foods are conducted at separate agencies, even though the problems of food contamination often overlap.
It didn't make a huge news splash, but the USDA released this week the results of its latest survey on hunger in the country, and more Americans spent last year hungry and reliant on private and public assistance. The rates of food insecurity for 2008 and 2009 are the highest since the survey began in 1995, and the numbers are especially bad for African Americans (25 percent of whom suffer from food insecurity) and Hispanics (a group for which the number is 27 percent). It's worth remembering as we head toward the holidays.
