How A Policy Review Can Inspire Change
By Daniel Bowman Simon
Late last year, I got a phone call out of the blue from Gus Schumacher. He’d read the short piece I’d written on the history of soda in the Food Stamp Program for the Huffington Post. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in collaborating on a longer piece with him and Michel Nischan, co-founders of Wholesome Wave. An opportunity to work with two guys I greatly admire. The answer was a no-brainer and the result is our article, “Healthy Food Access and Affordability: We Can Pay the Farmer or We Can Pay the Hospital” published in the new food issue of the Maine Policy Review.
What Gus was most interested in was not how soda became an eligible purchase with Food Stamps, but rather the discovery that the original Food Stamp Plan, which ran from 1939-1943, had been established to bridge the gap between farmers and America’s hungry. For many, The Great Depression left little money to put food on the table. That lack of money meant that farmers couldn’t earn a decent living growing fruits and vegetables. The government stepped in by allowing qualified individuals to purchase orange stamps in $1 increments. For every dollar purchase, a 50 cent blue stamp was provided free.
As the Washington Post explained in a 1939 article headlined “$1.50 in Food for Dollar,” “Orange stamps are good for any grocery item the purchaser elects, except drugs, liquor, and items consumed on the premises. Blue stamps, however, will buy only surplus foods—dairy products, eggs, citrus fruits, prunes, fresh vegetables, and the like.” Gallup polls from 1939 found that most Americans, Democrats and Republican, rich and poor approved of the Food Stamp Plan. It was this knowledge and a curiosity to discover more that formed the beginnings of our peer-reviewed Maine Policy Review article.
Consider this: Right now nearly 46 million Americans depend on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the new name for Food Stamps) to put food on the table. The investment represents more than 70 billion tax dollars. Health care costs for preventable diet-related illnesses continue to escalate, particularly for Medicare and Medicaid patients. And family farmers, who are oftentimes struggling to make ends meet and who grow food because they want to help people access healthy, wholesome food, tend to not benefit from a program that was designed to support them as well as provide healthful food to people who cannot afford it.
We end up paying the hospital instead of paying the farmer. The USDA reported that of the $64 billion dollars of SNAP benefits spent in 2010, only $7.5 million (or .01%) were redeemed at farmers markets. In 2011, the USDA reports that only 12% of all farmers markets are equipped with EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) terminal technology to accept SNAP benefits onsite. The good news is that that figure has risen by 16% in the past year. Also, there are at least 7,175 farmers markets in the U.S. this year, up significantly from last year’s 6,132. (The USDA National Farmers Market Directory is available at http://farmersmarkets.usda.gov)
Our Maine Policy Review article explores the history of food stamps, federal nutrition programs such as WIC, and updates the current work of Wholesome Wave, which partners with local community organizations to attract more SNAP recipients to farmers markets around the country. The article includes recommendations for how to connect more nutrition program recipients to healthy wholesome food while benefiting local farmers.
I invite you to read our article. Also, check out the entire special Food issue of the Maine Policy Review, which kicks off with essays from Kevin Concannon, USDA Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services and Chellie Pingree, family farmer and US Congresswoman for Maine’s 1st District. We welcome your thoughts.
