SNAP To It! Why Food Stamps Matter To All of Us—And Why They're Under Threat

by. And for all of those decades, they've been relied on, but they've also been resented,

“vilified, and threatened. Even though food stamps themselves technically have an existed”

for the past 20 years, that's because it's called SNAP today, and people are still fighting over it. Millions of low-income Americans are receiving the supplemental nutrition assistance program, also known as SNAP. They're getting hit with a massive change, a lot of them in fact, that go into effect today, so that comes as Trump's one big, beautiful bill cut nearly

$119 billion in funding to the program. We'll get into what those changes are, later in

the show, but this is just the most recent battle in an ongoing war about if and how we should help feed the hungry here in America. We are going to find out who wins and who loses. Here at Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber, and I'm Nicola Twilly, and this episode we are all in on welfare queens and government cheese. On our quest to figure out whether SNAP works. Why does our government give people money

just for food? Instead of cash, does it work better that way? And does it make sense to

“limit the food that this assistance can be used for, like by banning sodas and candy bars?”

Why are people still hungry when American farmers produce more food than we can even eat? When our food stamps meant to help deal with that surplus? All that, plus a heck of a lot of prunes, as we try to make sense of one of America's oldest and weirdest government food programs. This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the public understanding of science technology and economics, Gastropod is part of the

Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Edor. In general, the 1930s were a disastrous time in America. You had widespread deprivation. You had entire communities where people were without income and often without food. You were urban centers where you have massive unemployment and there's no safety net to speak of.

“Mr. Vobasso is a professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern and author of”

the book "Why SnapWorks", a political history and defense of the food stamp program. To understand where a snap comes from, we have to go back to this time and history to

the great depression. When about a third of Americans were hungry, and like Chris says,

there was no real system to get food to them. I mean, some states and localities have relief agencies with some modest, very modest cash assistance and modest other kinds of assistance. But it was much thinner, much more feeble, welfare state than even we think we have today, which made the deprivation that much more visible. At the same time, you had this paradox that farmers were overproducing food.

And this has been happening for years. American farms had become much more productive with the introduction of tractors and synthetic fertilizer, but no one had the money to buy the food. They produced any more because

Americans were broke. First of all, the depression decreased demand. When people make less

money, they're going to buy cheaper and less food. You also had a global depression, which decreased the demand in Trump export market. Herbert Hoover was the president at the beginning of the 30s, when there were all these agricultural surpluses that nobody was buying. Farmers were begging for government intervention. The cost of harvesting crops was more than they sold for. Hoover was reluctant to get

involved, but he did decide to have the government buy up some of the wheat that otherwise would rot in the field. But he didn't know what to do with it. Fortunately, Hoover lost the 1932 election, so it wasn't his problem anymore. The new president, Franklin Roosevelt, his administration had to deal with this mountain of surplus wheat. So they gave the wheat over the opposition, originally, of the flower millers and wheat

industry. They gave the wheat to the red cross, which distributed the wheat, the surplus wheat to local relief agencies in the various states. But this is a one-off. They decided this was a one-off kind of thing. So the issue of a glut of crops was still a problem, and there was no system to deal with it. People were hungry. Farmers weren't making money, and food was going to waste.

This whole time was kind of a shocking moment in American history. People were standing

nobody could afford to buy.

“So you have this paradox again. You have, on one hand, farmers being terribly productive,”

the United States is a place of immense resources, and you have this overproduction of crops and animals leading to literally massive surpluses of everything. And on the other side, people literally standing in red lines, falling through piles of potatoes. It was really not a good look. All this hunger, and yet all this perfectly good food, going to waste. And it was about to get worse.

First, the government decided to buy those crops themselves, so the farmers would have

some income. For example, they bought up all the extra pigs, farmers couldn't sell. But then instead of giving it away as pork, they would turn it into sludge, fertilizer. Nearly 80% of all pigs loaded in the U.S. in 1933 to 1934 were destroyed. Their meat wasn't eaten. We started seeing Sandy milk. You just poured milk down the drain literally. Or grain. You would burn the grain. This outraged people. Nobody was happy about the idea of destroying

food while there's hunger.

“Roosevelt had to do something different. He instructed a secretary of agriculture and other”

farm experts to come up with some plans. One thing they considered was paying farmers not to produce particular crops on some of their land. But the farmers hated that idea.

They didn't want the government telling them what to do.

Another option was for the government to intervene and set the prices of commodities like wheat and milk so that farmers could make a decent living. But that kind of price fixing wasn't a popular solution either. Well, objections were that you had a 25% unemployment and massive inability of people to afford food. And here's the dilemma for government. I mean, you want prices to be high enough

that farmers can make a living. Fair enough. You want food to be inexpensive enough so that consumers can buy it. Notice the tension. So the government decided that they buy up the extra food. This helped keep the prices from plunging and then they give away the surplus that they use tax money to buy.

“This is the important point. You're going to give that food away to those who need it as”

determined by local relief agencies. If the box literally the box of food that you might

think of as if at a food pantry today. So far, so great. But although this plan sounds simple, take the surplus, give it to the hungry and practice there were some challenges. There just wasn't a good national distribution network to store and share the harvest in an efficient way. And then another problem was that these boxes weren't put together thinking through like what a family might need to get

them through the week. It was really just okay. What do we have too much of? Let's ship that out. And sometimes people got stuff they didn't like or didn't know how to prepare. So you would literally sometimes get you know 30 pounds of citrus fruit in your box and maybe some cabbage. There are famous stories of Midwestern grandmothers getting grapefruit and not knowing how to prepare a grapefruit and boiling the grapefruit because they didn't know what it was.

In May 1938 lucky families in Chicago got four pounds of prunes, two pounds of dried beans and 12 pounds of cabbage, which I guess at least would have kept them regular. It wasn't just the people on the receiving end who had some issues with these boxes though. Shop owners weren't fans either because the people who got them were less likely to go to the neighborhood grocer or certainly at least they'd spend less money there. And so you can imagine retailers

are very upset. It's like competition as far as they're concerned. You're giving away food that you're where you spend taxpayers money on, me while the local retailers are struggling because people don't have the money to spin in their stores. This wasn't just a gripe. It was a real problem. Flower millers, bakers and retailers had all taken a severe hit when that initial one-off government purchase and donation of wheat to the Red Cross took place. In theory the government

could have helped out farmers and also given money cash directly to poor people so they could buy food, which would have supported both local stores and farmers. But no. A lot of frankly, a lot of Southern conservatives opposed the idea of conservatives and particularly with Southern conservatives especially really opposed the idea of giving cash to poor people. It was a racial dimension of this in the South as you can imagine, but not just the South. But it was also just

also this visceral not wanting to give cash to poor people because they didn't think poor people would spend the cash wisely. And that's where the idea of the food stamp program comes from. The basic idea behind the food stamp program was to have poor people use vouchers to pay for food. The way it was set up was kind of a complicated system. People would use orange vouchers to pay for regular food and blue vouchers to pay for surplus foods and they'd have to buy some of those

vouchers. The orange ones. I would come into my really leaf agency and I would have to spend a dollar in minimum. And in return for the dollar I would get a dollars worth of orange stamps. And I could use those orange stamps at any food item in the store just like cash. But I would get 50 cents in a bonus of blue stamps. And the blue stamps could be used for any food

buying your normal food that's why you had those orange stamps that you'd paid for. And then you'd

“get extra free bonus. The blue stamps that you could use on surpluses. That was to boost the”

spending of poor people and to give them more food but they'd have to use that extra spending only on surpluses. Like say prunes. You would go to the store and there's a box of prunes on the shelf. And it's 25 cents, let's say. You would use your blue stamps of 25 cents or your blue stamps to purchase that box of prunes. Just like maybe your neighbor using regular currency would use the same amount of regular currency 25 cents to purchase the same box. It's the same box,

no different, the same price. It's just different form of currency. And then the retailers took all the stamps, blew and orange to the bank. And the bank gave them cash and billed the

government aka the taxpayer. It all sounds a little complicated but Chris says it actually worked

really pretty well. People have made today maybe surprised to know it was actually very popular for a couple reasons. One, it reduced the stigma of standing in line for the box of food. Do not

“underestimate how much people hate that idea of standing in line for a box of food. It's demoralizing.”

And when it came to the box, you didn't have any choice. At least with the food stamps you could choose if you wanted surplus prunes or surplus cabbage. And people using those stamps could do their shopping at a regular grocery store. Just like everyone else in the neighborhood and so retailers loved it too. Did it make a huge dent in the surplus? Maybe not. But it stimulated more consumption. It stimulated the markets. And so it was very popular. In fact, it was so popular that the government

ran out of money to pay for it. They hadn't anticipated the demand. At its peak at the time,

there were about 4 million people using food stamps. And studies showed they ate better and

healthier diets compared to people who didn't have that assistance. They tended to use the extra blue stamps on more expensive proteins like eggs and pork. And they bought fresh fruits and vegetables when those were available. The food stamp program was launched in May 1939. And despite its

“evidence, success and popularity, it ended just a few years later in March 1943. Because what”

happens with the war is the war stimulates consumption. But does a couple things want to reduce the surplus because now U.S. is shipping food to its military receipts. It's shipping food to its allies. So you're reducing the surplus on one hand. Demand at home is risen because people are making money in the war industries. Everybody's employed now. And so there's no surplus hardly any surplus to speak of. But we do have food stamps or the supplemental nutrition assistance program

snap what food stamps eventually turned into. We still have that today. And it's grown far beyond Roosevelt's wildest imagination. How'd we get here? That story? After the break. Support for this episode comes in part from Square. Small businesses make the world go round. Without them, we'd just be living in a giant strip mall with all the same stores and restaurants. Where's the fun in that? My favorite restaurant in my neighborhood of L.A. Amiga Moray, which serves

Mexican Italian food, uses Square to take my payment for their delicious alotean urloty. Every Saturday I go to the farmer's market and I shop at a good 10 or so different farmers or vendors and nearly all of them use Square too. Square makes it simple to run a small business no matter what it is. Whether you're just starting out or whether you're growing your business into a franchise, squares easy to use hardware and software are built to make

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you can get up to $200 off Square Hardware at square.com/go/gastro. That's squ-u-a-r-e.com/g-o/gastro. Run your business marital with Square, get started today. Using planting machines, these modern tillers of the soil believe in mass production. The job doesn't stop with nightfall. American farmers are working overtime to produce the food to win the war. World War II may have killed the food stamp, but it also showed the seeds of its

resurrection. After ramping up during the war, after the war, American farmers were producing more than ever before. You also have less food being shipped over to our former allies because they're producing their own food again. So again, once again farmers are outproducing the marketplace. And to make it worse, or better, depending on your perspective, farmers became even more effective at farming in the 50s. Because, and we've talked about this many times on gastropod before,

fields, wartime chemicals, were repurposed as pesticides and herbicides, farm production soared, and so did those surpluses. That's also where international food aid comes from in the 1953 become food-for-piece program. We have a whole episode on this, called How The U.S.

“became the world's biggest food aid donor. You should check it out, but there was just so much”

food that the government couldn't give it away fast enough. So the government's buying surpluses and storing them in big warehouses, and you just have massive amounts of food being stored, and it was costing the government a total fortune to store that food at cost of billions of dollars.

It was, I think, the second or third biggest non-defense expenditure the government had by 1960.

It was that big. Meanwhile, hunger in America still existed. It wasn't anywhere near depression levels, but in 1955 the USDA estimated that more than one in 10 Americans would so poor that their diets were deficient. And gradually, people were starting to talk about this issue of hunger again. Some democratic senators had been trying to bring back food stamps. Including, then Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, by 1960 he was already on the campaign trail, and fighting hunger was a major part of

“his platform. He talked about it when he was campaigning in West Virginia. Well, now one of the things”

which we send abroad is surface food. I've been an anchor sponsor. Some of the other senators

sponsored a food stamp out of these people who are old, and who have not been able to find a job.

If they're going to receive assistance, there's a lot of assistance they can use. Kennedy, in his own travels in the 1960 election, begins to see these pockets of poverty in Appalachia in particular, and is really troubled by that. So you have, by 1960, a growing consensus among Democrats in particular, but even among some Republicans, of the need to do something about surplus and one side, and growing awareness of their hunger on the other side. Spoiler alert. Kennedy won the

Democratic Convention and then the election and he promised to take Americans to the Moon, but also to deal with America's recurring surplus and hunger issue. The new frontier is here whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier, our uncharted areas of science and space uncertain problems of peace and war, un-cognitive problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus. When Kennedy became president, he launched pilots around the

country to try out a renewed food stamp program. These totally did away with the two different colored stamps because at this point, it was really more about the poverty than the surplus.

“What was more important is as far as they were concerned, was stimulating consumption.”

And so the food stamp program was designed to enable low-income households to buy more and ideally better food because you've got more income, you tend to buy better quality food. This was a big conceptual shift. Like we said, the real priority for food stamps 2.0 was ending hunger rather than reducing surpluses, but another aspect of the food stamp program stayed

the same, at least at first, you had to buy the stamps. That was the part that was important.

They thought that people had to have skin in the game. This idea that they had to buy stamps. The pilots were successful, though, of course. They were just pilots. They were small-scale. And then Kennedy was assassinated. After Kennedy's death, Johnson took up the mantle of making sure that the program gets enacted into the food stamp act of 1964. And this administration today here and now declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

Which is the basis of today's supplemental nutrition assistance program today. So even with that hiatus during and just after World War II, food stamps are officially old now. Many, many decades old. And like anything that's been around that long, they've gone through some struggles. One of the early problems that emerged was that buying stamps just wasn't feasible for the very poorest Americans. Many didn't have the cash upfront to buy the stamps

to then get an extra bonus. And also this new food stamp program replaced what the government had been doing, giving out occasional free commodities or pluses. And so some of the people who had relied on those handouts and who couldn't afford food stamps were now actually hungrier than before. In any case, it turned out that making people pay for the stamps made the program less effective. So Democrats kept trying to get that purchase requirement waived. Meanwhile, Republicans and some

more conservative Southern Democrats didn't believe that people should get anything for free in America, at least not if they were poor. So they had this notion that if you're going to get any kind

of agriculture, the commodity program promoters would say, all right, I'll support your food stamps

“and we turn it for you supporting cotton program or I'll support more money for food stamps”

if you put in work requirements. So there's all this bargaining going on in Congress. The bargaining led to a pretty major change in the food stamp program in 1977 at the beginning of the Carter administration. When in return, you know, forgetting rid of the purchase requirement, this is one of the biggest changes. The get rid of the purchase requirement in return, okay, there's going to be some more work requirements regardless of these attempts to constrain who could get it, the food stamp program

kept expanding. Inflation in the 1970s had driven many more Americans into poverty and inequality had started to expand dramatically as labor unions and progressive taxation were steadily diminished.

By 1980, one in 10 Americans was getting food stamps. And the USDA was spending more on food

stamps than it was on agricultural programs. And then Reagan was elected and he was not a fan of helping out poor people. He had all sorts of super offensive rhetoric about welfare queens,

“this idea that people were living large off-government assistance. It's not that there wasn't”

any fraud, but this really wasn't widespread at all. So early 80s, the Reagan administration slashes social welfare spending, you know, cuts of the food stamp program, cuts of the nutrition programs, cuts welfare. At the same time, you had the worst economic recession since Great Depression. Meanwhile, once again, the problem of surplus was hitting the headlines. In the 1977 farm bill, dairy farmers had been given particularly generous price supports with predictable results in terms of over production

by the 80s. You have this massive amount of cheese being purchased and stored in butter and dried milk being purchased and stored by the government to keep dairy prices stable. That led to Reagan wanting to give it all away. The government shipped millions and millions of pounds of cheese and butter all around the country, and nobody had the storage or the systems to hand it out. It was a total mess. At one point, people on government assistance got an entire five-pound

block of American cheddar, which became known as government cheese. This government cheese business was widely mocked, and to sort of rescue the whole thing, Congress ended up funding an entirely new program that would funnel dairy and other surpluses to states while also funneling money to a whole new kind of organization that could distribute that excess. And suddenly, you had this organizational entity called a food bank that was going to be able to handle the commodity.

These food banks were kind of new. They had started to pop up and the late 70s and early 80s as a more organized way to try to feed people. So you have the surpluses back. It's just not in the same way. Suddenly, it's being diverted to the food bank sector. Which also raises the question, why do people need food banks when we already have food stamps? We're going to come

back to that, but first of all, we told you that food stamps are actually no longer technically

cold food stamps, so how did that happen? When Clinton was president, there was yet another battle over food stamps. Republicans pushed again to limit who could receive food stamps and increase how much they'd have to be working. These changes did end up getting incorporated into law, but in that law was another change, the move from the physical world to the digital one. And one of the provisions in there, we would move to EBT, electronic benefit transfer cards,

“debit cards essentially, to get rid of stamps. So that's why it was labeled SNAP in 2008,”

because there was no stamps anymore. Lots of people still call SNAP benefits food stamps, because it is the same program, just with the debit card and no paper stamps, but that can ruffles them feathers. Some people call food stamps because it evokes negative images. Those who usually defend SNAP called SNAP. But the change wasn't just a digital and a semantic one, it did make a material difference in the experience of the people who are using it.

Under the old days, and I know people who had food stamps in the old days, you had to stand in the line with your coupons and your cash, and you had to sort of pay cash for some things, and you had to use your coupons for the other, and people are behind you looking, yet, oh, she's buying steak with her food stamps, that kind of shaming dimension that goes on in lines. And some big supermarket would have separate food stamp lines, especially at the

beginning of the month, where they would have a different cash year for those with food stamps. So you can imagine how people felt about that. But with the new EBT card, you just go into the store and use it like a credit card. Another unanticipated benefit is that some non-food stamp shoppers, that kind of people who might present the idea that they as taxpayers are the ones paying for their neighbors to buy steak, or shrimp, or whatever else they feel like is too

richy for poor people to eat. They can no longer see that someone is paying using EBT. So that actually helps reduce one trigger that used to set people against food stamps.

There's never been a huge amount of fraud in the system, despite what the haters might say,

but there was some in the past, and there's less now. It's just harder to cheat. The biggest source of cheating oftentimes is retailers. Back in the old days, retailers would sort of do deals with customers, or they'd steal the stamps. EBT cards reduce fraud. Today, like we said, snap is America's longest running food assistance program, so on the level of pure lasting power, it's definitely a success.

But does it do what we wanted to do? Does it actually reduce hunger and help Americans get out of poverty and eat healthy or diet? And could it do those things better? It's judgment time for snap after this quick word from our sponsors. He says, "Catching!" "Taskit?" "Safe!" "Vizustaya!" "Hold it down, get to look!" Yet's cost and those else will be in.

“It's time to evaluate snap, and so one big question is, do we still need snap today?”

We're one of the richest countries in the world, but it turns out that about 1 in 7 Americans

are food insecure about a third of those are kids. These are people who aren't sure they'll be

able to buy enough groceries for their family each month. And snap does help. Yes, and that's unequivocal. I mean, there's every bit of evidence is that if nothing else snap reduces food insecurity. It enables households to buy more food. All the studies that we've seen indicate that. But that said, Chris says snap doesn't actually solve the problem of hunger and food insecurity in America for a variety of reasons. It often isn't enough by itself.

Snap benefits often don't last through a whole month, especially with families with teenage kids, because snap benefits don't take into account the age of the children. They're just numbers of people in a household. And everyone who's not in the federal government is perfectly aware that

“teens eat slightly more than toddlers do. Also, snap benefits are based on something called”

a thrifty meal plan. It's the idea that you'll be cooking things like beans and bulk rice. It averages out at not much more than $3 per person per meal. So it really relies on home cooking and bulk shopping. That's not possible for everyone. So even with snap, roughly 50% there's some estimates of 50% of snap households end up going to food pantries at the end of month. Which is why we still have that whole food bank system, Chris talked about, where the government

funds food banks through what they originally, 40 something years ago called the temporary emergency food assistance program, but eventually gave up and just took off the temporary. So snap does reduce food insecurity, though it doesn't get rid of the problem of hunger entirely. But then so how about nutrition and general well-being? Do people who use snap eat food that's overall better for them than poor people who don't have access to it? Chris says yes.

Higher snap benefits, the more the people going to afford better quality, fresher, more nutritious food. We know that. Kind of a improvement at time. Again, if you have more income, you buy better quality food, better quality proteins, more fruits and vegetables. One wrinkle is that while receiving snap benefits tends to lead to a healthier diet overall, Chris told us it is super tricky to assess whether snap positively affects people's health. Because snap and rollies tend to be poor,

they tend to have worse health to start off with because of a whole list of reasons. Poor people are typically more exposed to environmental toxins, they have less access to quality health care, they have more chronic stress, etc. Snap can't deal with all that. The only thing snap can do is give people money for food and as Chris keeps saying that has been shown to help them buy more better and healthier food options. But that doesn't stop some politicians and

activists from wanting to put restrictions on what snap users can buy to force them away from sugary sodas and Doritos and toward healthier options. There's a new effort to do that right now.

The Trump administration has allowed states to put these kinds of restrictions in place for the first

time. It has been called a major win for the Mahav movement. More states removing junk food from snap programs, that's food stamps, prioritizing real nutrition over processed snacks, sugary drinks. That brings the total to 12 states. So one doesn't so far, all restricting snap purchases

“of unhealthy foods beverages under the new USDA waivers. Honestly, before we talk to Chris,”

that sounded kind of logical to us, the Chris said there's no data that these restrictions encourage people to choose how they are options. I've seen no evidence so far that restricting people and what they can use their snap benefits on will work. For one thing, if I'll be blunt, if you want to buy your kids a two liter bottle of say Coca-Cola, which is available at the low

main ingredient. And three dollars is not a huge amount, even for folks who qualify for snap.

“So if you can't, you should snap dollars for it. You'll use all your money for it. So I don't”

think you'll have the intended impacts. Also, it's kind of a bureaucratic nightmare. Who is the person who's going to decide what's healthy and what's not? Something might be called a granola bar, but it actually might be a little better than a candy bar. Who makes that decision? The food

companies basically limiting snap benefits sounds good and theory, but is unlikely to make a

difference. What does work is carrots? Literally, in the form of incentives to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. A lot of states have what we call healthy and sense programs where if you get snap dollars, maybe the state will kick in another $10 a month that you can use at the local farmers market to buy fresh produce. Those work, so do higher benefits. The point is, if you give people more money, how are you do it? They use it again to buy better, more and better food.

Okay, so then what about overall poverty? Does snap help reduce it? Yes, actually, the studies I've

“seen say that snap if nothing else reduces poverty because again, it's an income supplement.”

We target it toward food, but the other day it's an income supplement. And money in my own,

that I'm not having to spend on food, I can use for other purposes. Researchers that found

that snap is particularly good at reducing extreme poverty and also poverty in families with children and kids in households that receive snap benefits are likely or to graduate high school, have better health and become economically self-sufficient than kids in low-income households that qualify for, but are not enrolled in snap. Making snap available to newly released prisoners even reduces their rate of reoffending. It's also more effective as an anti-poverty

program than a lot of our other anti-poverty programs, like say the child tax credit, because you don't have to be a parent or disabled or a veteran or whatever, you just have to need it. And it doesn't disappear once you go over a certain threshold, like others do,

“it's graduated. You just get less of it when you don't need as much. If you make more money,”

you get fewer snap benefits, but you don't get caught at the knees automatically. And also moving people out of poverty as snap does, it helps everyone. It turns out that each dollar of snap is money that's spent locally and generates even more economic activity. Throughout snap's history conservatives have worried that even if snap reduces poverty and hunger, it's still kind of morally questionable, because it incentivizes people not to work, so it's not to lose their free food.

This is Reagan's whole welfare queen stick. And as we told you, there are work requirements built into snap as a result. But Chris says that's actually counterproductive. A lot of those folks have other things going on, mental illness, addiction. They have educational deficiencies. They have other kinds of deficiencies. And so it's not quite clear that these people have an easy time holding a job. Period. Now again, there's a fair percentage of snap households people already

were working, so it's not going to incentivize those folks anymore because they're already working. They just don't make enough money. But that hasn't stopped the people who want to make sure anyone who's getting assistance is working hard for it. The Trump administration's most recent bill made work requirements even more strict. And so, frankly, more people are going to

go hungry. 42 million Americans participate in snap, but Rollins says 800,000 have moved off

food stamps in part because of the administration's expansion of work requirements. That could sound like a saving, but Chris says in reality, it just means pain. Not just in terms of more hungry people, but also they're a pain for the states to implement. Last states were out of not do them. They require a lot of bureaucracy. And so, frankly, a lot of states would rather not be burdened by doing work requirements because there's no evidence or very little evidence

that they actually incentivize work. But they are a pain to administer. The point here is not that states are lazy and don't want to do this. It's that the bureaucracy of making sure snap recipients are fulfilling their work requirements costs money. Often, as much if not more money as the state might say by kicking people off snap who are not fulfilling their requirements. And all those people being moved off snap, it's not like they suddenly can

afford all the food they need. They're totally fine. They're not. And the food bank system does not have enough food or infrastructure to take the place of snap. So, frankly, more people are going to go hungry. These initiatives this side, Chris says in general, snap is still doing what it's supposed to do. Reducing hunger, while boosting nutrition, and also reducing poverty, while not encouraging people to lazy around. But it's not the only tool that exists to achieve

those goals. So, what other things work better? The President wants to put a government-issued food in boxes and have it delivered to the people directly. Now, they compare it to blue apron that food delivery service for young professionals, young millennials. It ate that. This is

that then would be delivered. In a move that sounded suspiciously like the original boxes of

“30 pounds of citrus or four pounds of prunes, Trump officials in his first-time in office”

suggested that instead of snap, people in need would be sent a so-called harvest box. We've already seen why this doesn't work. It was widely ridiculed. Money everybody has is impractical, convoluted, and raw people of choice. Retailers also hated the box concept, because just like before in the days of four pounds of prunes, it would have bypassed them. And one thing to know about snap is it is actually a huge benefit to retailers in the food industry in general.

Big food companies like Kraft and PepsiCo and retailers like Walmart and Target. They benefit from and process tens of billions of dollars worth of snap money every year, which is the decent chunk

of their annual revenue. What's interesting about a lot of these major companies is that they don't

just benefit from processing snap. Also, they pay such a low wage minimum wage and they lobby for a low minimum wage that a lot of their workers are on snap assistance. In fact, Walmart

“and McDonald's are among the top companies in terms of workers who rely on snap. We are subsidizing”

that for them. Yeah, I mean, the critique is of course that it enables retailers in particular people in the food system in particular to have low wages. One of the charges levities that snap is a big subsidy for Walmart, for example. The entire food system is dependent in man respects on cheap labor. And cheap labor can only happen, you know, in man respects if you provide snap. We're other supports. It's sort of perverse in that sense. So if we're looking at other options

instead of snap, it seems like we could definitely spend a lot less on snap as a nation. If we

raise the minimum wage to a living wage, would that work? Chris says yes, but. So everybody says the higher minimum wages will be the higher prices. That's probably true. Again, we're subsidizing low prices already through the tax system and through the welfare system. I mean, in some respects, we already are paying the price just differently. So, you know, if we were paying a higher price for foods, the argument goes because of higher cost of labor, it'd be a more honest way of actually

how we approach food. Neither Chris nor I are optimistic enough to think that we're going to achieve that kind of honesty in our relationship with food in America any time soon, sadly. So yeah, we can dream and also vote for politicians who support a higher minimum wage. But food costs wouldn't necessarily soar with a higher minimum wage. These companies like Walmart that pay their workers so little that the workers need federal assistance, they often have

executives that make kind of insane amounts of money. They could just pay some of that to their workers of salary and they barely notice. Also, we could afford to help out people who can't work with programs like Snap, if those companies and their owners paid their fair share of taxes. Well, okay, I'll go there that, you know, again, I mean, if we just revoked all the tax cuts given under the last three Republican presidents, we wouldn't have this discussion.

And renewed last year, a trillion dollar tax cut for billionaires on the backs of poor people.

“It's not very scholarly of me, but as a citizen, I think it's unconscionable. I mean, we could”

easily pay for this. But, you know, it forced us to actually confront the fact that we're just giving away massive amounts of money to poor till rich people who don't really have anything to do with it. Yes, not like they're going to buy more food. I mean, how many yachts can be those have? Well, we're heading out to the barricades here. Let's just go all the way and ask, why not just give poor people cash rather than an EBT card they can only use on food? That famously liberal

president Richard Nixon even thought this was a great idea back in the 1970s. And it was actually a fair number of moderate Republicans and others in the early 70s who thought, "Wait, why don't we redo the tax system so that people are given a guaranteed minimum income through the tax system? Instead of this sort of the convoluted system of welfare, let's simplify things and use the tax system in a way that people are guaranteed a minimum income." And so there was serious effort

behind this. But it got derailed for a lot of reasons. We pointed this up before, but the primary reason is that we, not us personally, but we as a country, we don't have a lot of faith that poor people can make good decisions. We don't trust poor people to spend their money wisely. So we, you know, we make everything again, a voucher or tech credit. This is not very smart of us, because every single study that has been done on cash assistance or what is often called UBI

or universal basic income these days, every single study has found that it is the single most efficient and effective way to help poor people. And in fact, no other country does what we do, this weird food assistance thing rather than cash. Other countries that have welfare programs do cash assistance for poor people, it might be tax credits, but it's still money, not like you

we should replace snap with cash. Well, economists would think so. I mean, cash is the easiest

“thing to do at all. But that's going to be highly unlikely for a while. I don't see us anytime”

soon in this country expanding cash assistance. I just don't see it. I do logically or politically happening. It's this odd compromise we've had to make in America, giving people cash in the form of food benefits means that fewer people are against it. In a country where people are famously against welfare, at least in the abstract sense, they also don't want to see their fellow Americans go hungry. In fact, when you twist people, when there's public opinion polls and you ask people,

what do you think about welfare and some abstract sense, otherwise against it? But if you ask them

about more support for specific kinds of programs like nutrition support, people are for it. So people

programmatically are supporting snap because it's about food. This weird logic, where a weakness of snap, that it's less efficient than cash, is actually a strength because it means more people supported. That's one of the main insights of Chris's new book, Wise Snap Works. Snap Works, because it doesn't 100% make sense. Another big strength of snap is another thing that really made no sense to either of us until we read this book. Snap is part of the farm bill,

and it comes under the authority of the Department of Agriculture. Other than snap, the farm bill is mostly subsidies for corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, dairy and sugar, with some crop insurance, conservation programs, loans, and research in there too. Helping hungry people and helping farmers, those two things were connected in the original food stamp program, but they haven't been for decades. So it seems weird to keep snap in the farm bill, but Chris says this is why it's still

around. It comes down to political horse trading. The farmers need snap because it gives politicians from states with big commodity farms, something to negotiate over, to make sure politicians who don't have commodity farmers among their constituents still support all the subsidies and so on. Those were promoting agricultural programs are a smaller and smaller group. So they recognize that they have a sort of, you know, it's a bit of hostage taking. They're going to leverage support for food stamps

in return for liberals support for commodity programs. Though we should point out that there are a lot of snap recipients in rural areas as well, so politicians in those more rural states should also support snap, but in any case, if you separate it out snap from the farm bill, the farmers would

“lose. Nice commodity program you have there too bad about it. You know, why would I vote for that?”

Why would I support something that essentially welfare for affluent farmers? That's way it will be seen. So if I'm the ag sector folks, I'd be very careful about what I wish for, because this can come back to haunt you. But also, if you separate it out snap from the farm bill, snap would lose. Chris says that even though it's a tiny chunk of the federal budget way, way less than what we spend on, for example, defense or servicing the national debt, or for that matter social security,

it would be vulnerable out there on its own. It'd be too easy to sort of go at it as welfare, whereas if it sort of shielded within the farm bill to some extent, it becomes, you can bargain. And so, call me a bit skeptical about calls to move snap out of the USDA and out of the agricultural act, because I've said this to people who are nutrition folks who think it'd be better off on its own.

“I say, not in terms of the real politics. I think the real politics terms, you want all the”

fringe you can get. So basically, even with all its challenges, Chris says that snap works,

it's kind of the best we can do with our current political situation. Chris says what would make snap better would be to just make it easier to qualify for it. From my perspective, you want to enable everybody who is eligible, technically eligible, because of income, to get their benefits. But we throw up a lot of hurdles. I think the, under the recently enacted one-day beautiful act, they made it harder. We're going to force states to actually pay more in administrative costs.

We're going to force states to pace a portion of the benefits for the first time in history. These are all bad things. For my perspective, snap works, so I think you want to make it as easy as if it's possible for those who are eligible to apply for their benefits and get their benefits period into discussion. Thanks this episode to Chris Bosso. His new book is called Why SnapWorks. And we have a link to it on our website, Gastropod.com. Thanks also to our

fantastic producer Claudia Guy. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.