Yes, Replacing Food Stamps With a Blue Apron-Style Delivery System Is As Bad As It Sounds
(COMMON DREAMS) Mara Pellittieri, February 15, 2018 — Yesterday, the Trump administration released its fiscal year 2019 budget. For the most part, it’s similar to last year’s proposal: massive cuts to safety net programs, a big boost in military spending, and very Trump-ed up estimates of economic growth. But this year, tucked into the Department of Agriculture (USDA) subsection, the administration laid out a proposal to take away a chunk of the nutrition assistance many families rely on and replace it with a massive new food delivery program.
“Instead of being able to choose food based on their nutritional and family needs, SNAP households may get standardized boxes of food that the government chooses on their behalf.”
Under the proposal, households receiving $90 or more per month in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits—which accounts for the vast majority of all of the households who currently participate in SNAP—will receive a portion of their assistance in the form of a box of pre-selected food. According to the USDA, which would be responsible for administering the program, the box would be filled with items like pastas, peanut butter, beans, and canned fruit, intended to “improve the nutritional value of the benefit provided and reduce the potential for EBT fraud.”
In effect, the proposal is a paternalistic spin on Blue Apron: Instead of being able to choose food based on their nutritional and family needs, SNAP households may get standardized boxes of food that the government chooses on their behalf. Hunger and nutrition experts have panned this as “costly, inefficient, stigmatizing, and prone to failure.” A 2016 USDA study found no evidence to suggest that households who receive food stamps need the government to select their food for them—their spending habits are almost identical to other households. (The only exception is baby food—SNAP households buy a lot more of it, because they’re twice as likely to have a child under age 3.) Replacing the food that people are buying for themselves with pastas and canned fruit is likely a nutritional downgrade. And, since the food is being delivered directly to families, it’s unclear whether families will get the opportunity to provide input based on allergies or specific nutritional needs—say, to account for a peanut allergy, or for all that baby food.