Dissecting another “food stamp hardship” story

Last updated on: November 2, 2013 at 10:46 pm by Jane the Actuary

Dissecting another “food stamp hardship” story 2013-11-02T22:46:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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This story, “Food stamps put Rhode Island town on monthly boom-and-bust cycle” appeared in the Washington Post a while back, and a reader, Jim, linked to it in a comment on my prior post on food stamps. I had read it before, and was disturbed by the “binge-buying” on the first of the month, but now I want to look at it more closely in terms of the couple that’s being profiled:

They’re young — she’s 21, his age is unmentioned — with a toddler and a three-year-old, and, with no particular skills, they’ve bounced between unskilled jobs (fast food, grocery store work) and unemployment. Currently they earn a combined $1,700 per month, low enough to qualify for a partial food stamp benefit. The article mentions some of their expenses/debts (it’s not clear which are monthly expenses and which are bills they’re behind on): $600 for rent, $110 for cell phones, $75 to the tattoo parlor, $840 to the electric company. They have one car (he doesn’t drive) for which they pay $90 a week, due to their poor credit.

This is what she buys: at the first store, cookies that the three-year-old grabbed, two boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch ($2.49), a four-gallon bottle of cooking oil ($5.99) and three gallons of milk ($3.10), plus 15 other items totaling $49.20. At Walmart she abandons her list because of the childrens’ tantrums, “picking up anything that looked healthy or filling and dropping it into the cart.” Goldfish and string cheese that one of the kids picked up and opened get purchased. Play-doh that the child opened up. And enough other groceries to total $168. “She had spent about two weeks of SNAP money on groceries that would last seven or eight days.”

Now, the article describes the frenzy of the first of the month in places so impoverished that nearly all the customers are on food stamps, so it may be that the chaos caused the tantrums and the shopping frenzy. Certainly the program is poorly administered if there’s routinely first-of-the-month chaos.

But, of course, the very concept of the “supplemental” program is that, for the working poor, a part of the food budget is supposed to come out of their paycheck. Now, I suppose, there’s a bigger issue, if an unemployed person gets any number of additional benefits — cash welfare, housing subsidies, and the like — but the working poor are actually in worse shape financially so simply can’t swing it to pay their rent, basic utilities and other unavoidable expenses, and have any money left over for food, which becomes “optional” in that it’s easier to find a food pantry than the cash for bills.

But it also doesn’t feel right for $217.20 to last for “seven or eight” days, for a family with two small children. This is well beyond my weekly grocery budget, with three school-aged boys plus my husband and I — though, to be sure, the article doesn’t specify if this is solely the food stamp spending or if it includes diapers and other purchases. I would also expect that the family would qualify for WIC, which would cover the milk and other basic items for the children. On the other hand, I generally pay no more than $2.50 for a gallon of milk, so maybe the overall food prices are higher in Rhode Island?

Yet it’s clear that this couple’s youth is also part of the problem — getting so frazzled as to randomly grab food, getting lunch at Burger King afterwards, even having “spoiled vegetables” in the fridge (which happens to the best of us, but is also something you’d expect the “food-insecure” to determinedly avoid). Look: I have shopped with a toddler and a three-year-old. It’s not fun. But I simply don’t recall buying things not on the shopping list due to tantrums.

At the same time, the food stamp allotments are based on the USDA Thrifty Food Plan, which, so far as I can tell, consists of quantities of ingredients, but without any kind of model meal plan demonstrating how these foods can be transformed into healthy, if repetitive, meals. And it is troublesome that the allotment is the same for all regions of the country, despite variability in food costs.

There are meal plans out there — the work of bloggers and such organizations as the Iowa State University extension, who posted weekly menus created by students in the dietetic program. How much help are food stamp recipients given in the art of meal planning and cooking thrifty meals (especially meals which can be prepared easily)? My hunch is, not much.

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Also on CNN: food stamp "hardships"

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