Back Forty: Why SNAP works

Back Forty will bring you periodic reviews, interviews, and reporter insights about the stories they wrote. We hope you enjoy it as a companion to our content on TheFERN.org and our Ag Insider policy news site. You can subscribe to the newsletter below.

By Bridget Huber

The paradox of want amid plenty is a defining feature of American society. Food insecurity is on the rise today, even as crop yields, corporate profits, and farm income are sky high. The government has sought to address this paradox at least since the Great Depression, when the public recoiled as farmers destroyed a billion pounds of pork to bring supply in line with demand and stabilize prices, even as hungry people waited in breadlines. In response to the outrage, the Roosevelt administration began buying up surplus food and distributing it to the poor.

But handing out food was cumbersome — and unpopular with grocers and unions representing food system workers, who feared it would undercut their business. Even social workers considered the surplus distribution demeaning and unpredictable, if helpful.

The first iteration of what was called The Food Stamp Plan, which eventually became The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, came in 1939. Today, SNAP is not just the nation’s largest nutrition program, it’s the second-largest anti-poverty program overall for non-elderly people, after the Earned Income Tax Credit.

In his new book, Why SNAP Works: A Political History — and Defense — of the Food Stamp Program, Christopher Bosso examines this “ungainly — and ingenious — compromise” that keeps some 41 million Americans from going hungry.

The question animating Bosso’s book is why SNAP has survived despite recurring waves of anti-welfare sentiment that have shredded much of the social safety net, as well as calls for more progressive remedies that would address hunger’s root cause — poverty — such as a higher minimum wage or a guaranteed minimum income.

One reason is what Bosso, a professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern University, calls “a tactical marriage” between supporters of anti-hunger programs and those of farm support programs. The union, which isn’t without strain, puts both SNAP and agricultural subsidies under the same legislative roof: The farm bill. To get the bill passed, rural conservatives — who tend to back farm programs — and urban liberals — who reliably vote for anti-hunger programs — must find common cause.

For the most part, this marriage of convenience has succeeded. Nutrition spending accounts for about 80 percent of the farm bill, and farmers keep getting subsidies and crop insurance, despite making up less than 2 percent of the population. But Republicans have repeatedly tried to curtail SNAP spending, arguing that it is too expensive, reduces incentives to work, and goes to undeserving people. In the two most recent farm bills, those of 2014 and 2018, they’ve tried, and failed, to decouple farm supports and SNAP. Right now, with the current farm bill about to expire, House Republicans are advocating changes to the next bill that would eliminate SNAP benefits for more than 1.3 million people, according to a recent analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Despite these threats, the fact that SNAP is “cash-like” but not cash, has protected it from the brunt of anti-welfare sentiment, Bosso writes. First, it can only be used to buy food, which makes it more tolerable for anti-welfare Republicans than giving poor people money they can spend as they choose. Still, while that might be good for the program’s survival, it isn’t necessarily best for the people it aims to serve; cash benefits are the “simplest and most effective way” to help poor people improve their lives, Bosso writes. 

SNAP’s “cash-like” nature also gives recipients more leeway to choose which foods they buy than more prescriptive programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) that has a strict list of allowable foods. That makes SNAP both less paternalistic and stigmatizing while also giving the poor more means to participate in the mainstream consumer economy. What could be more American than that?

And limiting SNAP to food purchases means that the program also benefits a range of powerful entities, including the grocery and food-processing industries and farmers. So even if poor people aren’t a powerful political bloc, the business interests that profit from SNAP certainly are.

In tracing the program’s evolution, Bosso shows that many of the worries about the SNAP — that it will go to the “wrong people” or be used to buy the “wrong” foods — go back to its inception. The House version of the Food Stamp Act of 1964, which created the program as we know it, did not allow food stamps to be used to buy soda or other “luxury” foods. But the Senate and the Department of Agriculture rejected that provision, claiming that it would make the program more administratively complex. Still, proposals to block people from using SNAP to buy unhealthy foods are perennial. 

In fact, SNAP recipients’ diets aren’t much different than those of average Americans, Bosso writes. He cites economists who say that if recipients were not allowed to use their benefits for, say, soda, they’d likely buy it anyway, if they wanted to, with cash. 

If we really want to improve the diets of low-income people, Bosso says, more restrictions aren’t an effective way to do it. Instead, he argues, SNAP recipients’ diets improve when they have more money to spend. Since boosting benefits is politically fraught, incentive programs that give bonus benefits for the purchase of fresh produce — like double coupons at farmers markets — “seem to sidestep the landmines apparent with efforts to make SNAP more prescriptive,” he writes.

Bosso ends with several suggestions for improving SNAP, including addressing the fact that some states make it harder than others to get benefits, by requiring drug tests or frequent recertification. But others go out of their way to reach potentially eligible people and help them apply. The result is that in some states, like Oregon and New Mexico, virtually everyone eligible for SNAP gets it. But in Mississippi and Arkansas only 62 percent do, and in Wyoming — the state with the lowest participation rate — only 49 percent of eligible people get SNAP. 

Overall, Bosso leaves us with the sense that SNAP, despite its many imperfections and detractors, is not in peril. Even the most extreme proposals to cut SNAP aren’t existential threats; no proposals to eliminate the program altogether have gained traction in recent years. Instead, cuts have focused on how the program is administered — who should get benefits, how much, and for how long.

But that offers only limited reassurance. Cuts to SNAP can have devastating effects on the individuals who lose benefits. And SNAP’s defenders must constantly fight to keep from losing ground, using enormous amounts of energy and political capital to defend the status quo instead of moving toward transformative action that might actually address the paradox of want amidst plenty.