To understand food stamps, you have to start from the beginning, which is American agribusiness. In scale, it approaches the military-industrial complex in enormity.
From 1930 to in some places 1940, the Dust Bowl devastated farmers in the middle of the US from Texas to Canada. Tens of thousands of farms were wiped out. But the amazing thing is that, at the same time, the remaining farmers were so productive, that America had too much food and prices crashed.
Wheat cost 20 cents a bushel, and corn was being burned for fuel, while people elsewhere were starving. So FDR created the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, to destroy vast amounts of excess food, and transport and give away some of it to the starving people.
One of its first acts was to confiscate, slaughter and bury six million pigs. From there, at the point of a gun, it went around the country destroying food everywhere.
And since that time, American agribusiness has been a fascist-economics model of government-private business. Farmers are still paid to not grow food, and billions are spent every year to stabilize farm prices.
Now here’s the zinger: if the government wanted to, for the money it currently pays, every single person in America could have food for free. As things stand right now, instead the government still has to buy enormous amounts of food and store it in warehouses until it rots.
Expensive, temperature controlled warehouses. So if they gave this food to the poor, instead, it would actually *save* money.
Reagan did this with surplus cheese, and it was hugely popular. But how did it affect the market price of cheese? Simply put, it didn’t. This is because the stabilized price for cheese is so high, that the poor didn’t eat a whole lot of cheese.
So, as a lot of people have suggested, how do you get poor people to start cooking and eating healthier, subsidized food?
Well, you probably won’t have much luck if you start with them as adults. Years ago, they had the idea that if kids were given healthy school lunches, they would grow up to like healthy food. While this is eventually true, it took a lot of healthy food thrown into trash cans before kids finally started to eat some.
But there was an unforeseen problem. They might be willing to eat better food, but they did not know how to cook it. Ironically, about the same time, schools stopped teaching mandatory classes in home economics. Because it was “sexist” or something.
Not a good idea. Neither boys nor girls were taught home management skills. So how do you learn to cook, clean, do laundry, etc., if nobody teaches you? In many cases, you don’t.
So a good rule of thumb is that children of families on food stamps need to be enrolled in home economics classes, a modern incarnation of which should be much more comprehensive than it used to be.
I can imagine basic home economics taught even in elementary school, with four years of high school home ec, until the typical ‘C’ student knows how to make at least two dozen nutritious meals that taste good for several people, knows how to shop in grocery stores for maximum value at minimum cost, knows the value of a long term food preparation plan and how to make one, how to can food, store food, keep a hygienic kitchen, etc.
They may still prefer to eat only rice and beans, at least for a while, but at least knowing that other food is out there and tastes good means they probably won’t raise their own kids to only like rice and beans.