Why Food Stamps Don't Pay for Healthy Meals
I applaud Monica Marier's commitment and the good intentions of Sesame Street's producers in drawing trying to draw attention to child hunger in the United States. Certainly, far too many children grow up in bad circumstances in the United States and some of these circumstances relate to food.
All that said, no matter how often Sesame Street, the mainstream media, or anyone else says so, poor children are not "starving" in any significant numbers in the United States. The official government statistics, although rather obtuse in their terminology, make it clear: in the most recent period for which we have good numbers, only 1.3 percent of children actually "were hungry, skipped a meal, or did not eat for a whole day" because their families lacked the means to procure food.
This is a problem, of course--no child should go hungry, ever--but it may be beyond simple food-related public policy to remedy: simple analysis of the numbers of children who are in foster care (nearly all of whom would have suffered some sort of neglect, including being left without food, before being placed) and the number of adults who have serious mental illnesses (about 1 or 2 percent of the population) reveal that much of the problem may relate more to acts of parental negligence and health that have nothing to do with food policy per se.
Also, of course, its worth saying missing a meal once in the course of a year--the only thing needed to land in that 1.3 percent--is not a tragedy by itself so long as the child in question gets adequate amounts of food all the rest of the year.
In fact, focusing on a reasonably minor but obviously sympathetic problem leads people to ignore a much bigger one and more complicated: the terrible state of human nutrition among the poor in the United States and the failure to expensive government programs to remedy it.
Essentially, the great profusion of food and nutrition programs (76 percent of the Department of Agriculture budget) does assure that everyone gets enough calories but has utterly failed to improve human health by by any measure. Obesity rates among SNAP (previously known as Food Stamps) recipients are enormous, few parents and even fewer children from the bottom levels of society know how to cook healthy meals, and, as Michelle Obama has correctly pointed out, the free and reduced price school lunch and breakfast programs that provide much of the food poorer children are often not nearly as healthy as they should be.
Many programs, indeed, may make things worse: the WIC program (nutrition and certain medical care for pregnant women and their children) provides subsidies only for some of the highest calorie foods. This would make sense if WIC recipients got nothing else but a most also benefit from SNAP and, sometimes school/lunch breakfast programs. SNAP, the biggest program by far, is also problematic: it gives people limitless flexibility to stock up on chips, candy, and soda but won't let them spend a penny on lightly prepared foods--roasted chickens, prepared salads--that are often the healthiest and most cost effective choices in a typical supermarket.
Inner city economic decline, high taxes, and over-regulation, likewise, have left many of the poorest areas of the country without full-service supermarkets. And so forth.
The root cause of most of this is that the programs--SNAP, school lunch/breakfast and so forth--are mostly designed to benefit agriculture rather than the people who benefit from them. Simply spending more on the programs won't do anything and could even make certain things worse. Children are not starving in the United States but many do eat poorly. Improving things requires a rethinking of all of these programs that recognizes the problem for what it is--nutrition, not hunger--and puts focuses on lower-income children rather than agribusiness.
