U.S. anti-hunger programs should address the twin challenges of nutrition — supplying enough food and encouraging diets built around healthy food — at the same time after decades of focusing on a lack of food for poor Americans, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Wednesday. The USDA food box giveaway program might emerge in a new format, he said, because of its success in delivering perishable foods to people isolated from grocery stores, though a decision has yet to be made.
During a National Press Foundation webinar, Vilsack said high rates of obesity and chronic disease underscored the need to transform the food system to make diet quality as important as an adequate food supply. The federal government spends more to treat diabetes each year than it earmarks for the USDA’s budget, he said. Obesity by itself is a factor in chronic diseases such as diabetes, stroke, and some cancers.
“I think first and foremost, we obviously have to modernize our nutrition security and food security, and our assistance programs,” said Vilsack. “It means significantly expanding access and participation in the programs.” The number of people enrolled in SNAP and WIC is well below the number who are eligible to enroll.
There are two issues for food programs, he said: hunger and “nutrition security,” meaning a healthy diet. “Once you get your mindset focused on those two challenges, then you can address both challenges simultaneously. … We haven’t married them, and I think it’s important to do that.”
The USDA has extended the Farmers to Families Food Box program, the Trump administration’s answer to hunger during the pandemic, through April while it reviews the $6 billion initiative, which has been criticized as inefficient and inequitable. USDA officials said the program went into operation last spring without a formula to assure aid was distributed fairly. Under the program, contractors bought food — fresh produce, dairy products, and cooked pork and chicken — at the local level, packed it, and delivered the boxes to food banks for distribution.
“No decision has been made as to whether or not it will be extended,” said Vilsack in response to a question. “What I hope we will be able to do is to figure out how we can continue to provide access to healthy, nutritious foods [to] those remote areas that, because of the food box program, for the first time had access to perishable items that they might not otherwise have had access to.”
In some ways, the food box program operated in parallel with The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), a longtime USDA initiative that donates packaged and dry foods to charities and has an established network of vendors. The food box program was created from scratch, and there have been complaints that some contracts went to inexperienced bidders and that some contractors overcharged the USDA.
The USDA runs an array of nutrition programs, the largest being SNAP, with 43 million participants. There are also WIC, TEFAP, and child nutrition programs, headlined by school lunch. Roughly two-thirds of the USDA budget goes to public nutrition.
President Biden has proposed a three-month extension, to Sept. 30, of a temporary 15 percent increase in SNAP benefits. He also ordered a review of the so-called Thrifty Food Plan, which is used to set benefit levels for food stamps. In a fact sheet, the USDA said it “has begun the process of updating the Thrifty Food Plan to better reflect the true cost of a healthy basic diet today.”
SNAP benefits should be raised permanently by 20 percent from their pre-pandemic level, said the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is active on nutrition issues. The foundation also advocates removing barriers to SNAP enrollment and funding incentive programs that encourage the purchase of fruits and vegetables by SNAP recipients.
The USDA fact sheet on actions to prevent hunger during the pandemic is available here.