Public aid is becoming an increasingly thorny topic, with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recent push to restrict which items can be purchased through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the federal Food Stamp Program.
The mayor's proposed initiative would bar recipients from using food stamps to purchase soda and sugary drinks. In response, people in the New York area and beyond are questioning whether the government should dictate how people spend their public aid money.
The prevalence of welfare in the United States has undoubtedly grown over the last few years, and the number of SNAP recipients has risen sharply since the economic recession began.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, average monthly participation in SNAP went from under 26 million people in 2005 to over 33 million in 2009, and that number has soared to over 40 million in the current year.
Edith Balbach, senior lecturer of community health and one of many who have expressed concern with Bloomberg's proposed restriction, explained that for food stamp users on extremely tight budgets, providing their families with enough food is more important than providing them with fully nutritious, healthful meals.
"The money is so small that if you have a family that's trying to maximize its calories per dollar so the kids aren't screaming that they're hungry, the temptation to spend that on high caloric, high fat, low food−value items as opposed to fruits and vegetables and things that we know make people healthy is pretty tempting," she said.
In addition, Balbach said that although the mayor is trying to combat obesity, he is addressing health problems as though there were one "magic bullet" remedy — namely making soda unavailable — when the issue is actually far more complex.
"The logic of it is flawed and I think it's looking for a single villain when it's probably a really complex web of causality that's causing obesity," she said.
Junior Erik Antokal agreed, saying that making soda unavailable to food stamp users is a solution to the wrong problem — food stamp recipients, in his opinion, are not buying unhealthful foods because they are ignorant of their poor nutritional value, but because they are cheaper.
"It's not so much that people don't know how to eat healthy," he said. "It's that they don't have access to fresh fruit stands, or that McDonalds is cheaper than buying a chicken to cook for the family with vegetables — a wholesome, fully nutritious meal."
Limiting recipients' access to soda, he said, will not change the situation.
At the same time, SNAP is a federal program and there is plenty of precedent for the government to apply restrictive measures to its programs, Laurie Goldman, lecturer of urban and environmental policy and planning, said in an e−mail to the Daily.
"The idea of restricting the use of subsidies is common in other policy domains," she said. "Federal housing vouchers can only be applied to dwellings that meet quality standards for safety and affordability."
Balbach added that there have been restrictive measures for food and nutrition services in the past, some which have been very effective and allowed the programs to run efficiently.
"The Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program limits what people are allowed to buy," she said. "It restricts it to some healthy things that pregnant women, new mothers and their children need. … That has universally been thought to be a successful program."
According to both Balbach and Goldman, however, unfortunate conditions among poor urban communities make the successful application of similar measures to the SNAP program impossible.
"To take the same model [as the WIC program] and put it on food stamps, you could say theoretically would be OK, but the simple fact of the matter is that where a lot of poor people live, there's going to be a lot of trouble getting access to the food that's going to be on that [approved] list," Balbach said. "If you say you're only allowed to buy fresh produce, whole grain bread, whole−fat milk [then you're] coming up with the list of things that assumes that the markets near where the poorest people are living are going to have any of that stuff."
Goldman agreed, stating that it is important to grant people aid they can use in their immediate neighborhoods.
"Restricting the use of subsidies to food that meets a quality standard cannot address the problem of local accessibility," she said.
There are, however, other measures one can take to encourage food stamp users to eat more healthfully, Balbach said, some of which are already underway.
"You're now allowed to use your food stamps at farmers' markets, and there are a number of communities where they are putting incentives, like if you spend a dollar's worth of your food stamp money, you will get two dollars worth of farmers' market food because farmer's market food tends to be a little more expensive," Balbach said. "In the last farm bill, they got more permissive. I think people are starting to think a lot more about the U.S. food supply, and how do we improve the quality of the choices that people are making."
