The food stamp challenge (again)

Last updated on: December 2, 2013 at 9:50 am by Jane the Actuary

The food stamp challenge (again) 2013-12-02T09:50:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Chicago Tribune columnist Barbara Brotman is the latest journalist to “take the food stamp challenge” and report on it. (*Note: this link seems to take you to a paywall, but if you google food stamp challenge brotman, you’ll get there.) Does she do it right?

First of all, her budget is $31.50 a week — the average food stamp benefit. This means she starts off wrong, since the “average” benefit includes all those who are determined to have sufficient income that their food budget only needs supplementing, not that their entire food needs must be met. The current monthly maximum benefit is $189 per month for a single individual, or (using 4.3 weeks per month) $44 per month, significantly more than $31.50.

(This is a fixed amount all across the USA, which means that people living in high-food-cost areas will have a more difficult time of things than low-food-cost areas. Should the benefit vary by region? No doubt.)

Second, she walks into Aldi without a meal plan, just buying food items that seem to make sense but only “netting one dinner plan.” Here’s what she reports buying: milk, cereal, chicken thighs, cheese, sliced turkey, one grapefruit, lettuce, grapes, generic tuna, generic chocolate cookies, cheap bread, apples, oranges, a cantaloupe, three peppers, spaghetti, sauce, bag of frozen vegetables (she buys either the frozen vegetables or all three of the last items, it’s not clear which, at Trader Joes for $4).

Third, she’s a bit of a food snob: the spaghetti sauce “was so bad that pasta made an unappetizing alternative.” (I eat Aldi’s spaghetti sauce regularly.) The sliced turkey “tasted and looked like bologna.” Her only frozen vegetables are from Trader Joes (did she just not trust Aldi? Insist on organic?), and she buys no canned vegetables. There are no meatless entrees (e.g., a beans and rice meal). And she moans about the monotony of turkey and cheese sandwiches for lunch everyday.

Fourth, there would indeed have been more variety if she’d been cooking for a family — she could have purchased several types of lunchmeat for variety, and, of course, a variety of dinner entrees. And single adults are fairly limited in their eligibility for food stamps, so this isn’t really representative.

Having said this, I’ve never done the “food stamp challenge” myself. In the first place, I doubt I could interest my husband in bringing his lunch into work and sacrifice eating out — and a proper “food stamp challenge” would require a longer time period than a week. But our family’s benefit would be $750 per month, or $174 per week for the five of us, which is as much as I spend on a stock-up grocery trip, with paper products and cat food. Maybe someday I’ll add in hypothetical amounts for him and track our spending, just to be able to document my feeling that maximum-benefit food stamp allotments are fair sums of money. . .

Update: having written the above, I then googled “food stamp challenge” and found this article at the Washington Post, which confirmed my hunch that the stories of insufficiency of food stamps come largely from the working poor who aim to meet their entire food spending through food stamps (and food pantries), even though they receive lesser benefits due to the expectation that they contribute some of their own income.

Fundamentally, the issue is, in part, that the working poor, who are pressed for time in ways the unemployed are not, are least able to cook from scratch and most need to, to stretch their food stamp dollar. And, if this group expects food stamps/food pantries to meet their entire food costs, and potentially has all their remaining income taken up by other fixed expenses (e.g., housing and utilities) then there are other issues — maybe, in part, a failure of the Section 8 housing voucher system to meet needs, not the food stamp system.

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