However you want to look at them, the official numbers publicized in recent months about how many people are on some kind of food assistance are staggering.
Numbers for November 2009 – which are probably higher since then because of the continued increases in unemployment – indicated that more than 28.4 million people were enrolled in what is officially called the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as food stamps. Including administrative expenses, the annual cost of SNAP was running at more than $37.65 billion on average monthly allowances – called benefits – of $101.52 per recipient.
From a historical perspective, the food stamp program covered 2.89 million people in 1969, when the monthly allowance was $6.63 and the federal government’s annual cost was $250 million. By 1989, the numbers increased to 18.8 million enrollees, monthly payments of $51.85 and a federal budget tally of $12.9 billion.
Another report indicated that in August of 2009 there were 36.5 million Americans, about half of them children, who were covered by one of the many domestic food and nutrition assistance programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. One estimate suggests that, for various reasons, there are another 18 million eligible people who are not enrolled in SNAP.
An in-depth analysis indicated that more than a quarter of the population was on food stamps in 239 counties; more than one-third of the children were supported by food stamps in 800 counties; food stamp rolls had doubled in 62 counties in the previous two years; and the rolls were up by two-thirds in another 205 counties.
Widely dispersed geographical areas made up those statistics. They included the expected centers of poverty such as urban ghettos and rural Appalachia but, quite surprisingly, the counties with the highest increases in SNAP enrollments were the suburbs of Atlanta; most of Wisconsin and Florida; western and northern Ohio; and the mountain and desert states such as Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.
According to public and private sector food assistance program representatives who were guests on Wisconsin Public Radio, the state’s enrollment in SNAP had increased by 37 percent in the previous year – 44 percent in suburbs, 34 percent in urban areas and 20 percent across the rural landscape. They also indicated that in Wisconsin only 50 to 60 percent of the those eligible for food stamps are receiving them compared to a national average of 66 percent. Missouri stands at the top with 90 percent of its eligible residents enrolled in SNAP.
For the current school year, there were about 2,100 students, or 41 percent of the total enrollment in the Manitowoc school district who qualified for free or reduced price lunches. In Sheboygan, the overall percentage was 45 percent, up to 4,589 students from 3,937 a year earlier, but as high as 80 percent in some of the elementary schools.
In Manitowoc, a reduced-price lunch costs 40 cents compared to the regular price of about $2. Federal subsidies reimburse school district lunch programs 25 cents per fully paid meal, $2.28 per reduced-price meal and $2.68 for each of the free meals.
The national total of students on free or reduced price lunches has surpassed 18 million. A family of four qualifies for free school lunches if its annual income is less than $28,655, while those with an income of less than $40,793 qualify for reduced-price lunches.
Another study, conducted before the full impact of the economic recession hit in 2009, estimated that a record 49 million Americans in 17 million households did not have dependable access to an adequate amount of food in 2008. That converts to one in every six adults and one of every four children.
Among those who are considered to be food insecure, about 40 percent are not eligible for SNAP. They are directed instead to private food pantries, which faced an approximate 30 percent increase in demand for their services in 2009.
In late 2009, Wisconsin had about 360,000 residents seeking food from about 1,500 food pantries, according to the private Feeding Wisconsin organization. Food stamps cannot be redeemed at those sites. Amid all these numbers, a disturbing one is that about 100 pounds of edible food, the equivalent of a quarter pounder a day, is wasted annually per capita. A study in Arizona several years ago concluded that 42 percent of the food grown or prepared goes to waste before it is consumed.
That was one statistic I had trouble believing but virtually the same number came to my attention in the February 2010 issue of Harper’s magazine’s monthly index of often startling statistics. It stated that 40 percent of all the food in the U.S. supply is wasted and that 25 percent of all the fresh water used in the country goes toward growing or preparing food that is eventually wasted.
What an indictment of the entire system, from producer to consumer, that is. It’s alarming that this extreme amount of waste never seems to get any public attention. Just imagine what it does to food costs.
On a related point, an even more disturbing realization is that the cheapest food is really junk food. People trying to stretch their food budgets resort to buying items that are high in sugar and fats but very low in nutritional value for the number of calories.
That’s a major reason why many people who are obese are also categorized as food insecure – a fact difficult and uncomfortable to ponder but one that’s all too real; this is shown in the correlation of states with the lowest incomes having the highest percentages of obese residents. One of the problems with food assistance programs is that they try to stretch the dollar at the cost of providing food that’s often more harmful than nutritious.
If that isn’t enough to chew on, it’s disturbing for the food-production or agriculture sector to realize that sales of the food, particularly fresh vegetables fruits, dairy products, and meats, are suffering because of the lack of buying power. Just as disturbing is the switch to buying less nutritious processed foods when the dollars are scarce.
But some progress is apparently being made, particularly in California, which provides the lion’s share of the nation’s fresh produce. Among the state’s 44 food banks, there has been a movement away from obtaining scratched and dented cans of food toward fresh produce. Still, fresh produce only accounts for 20 percent of what’s being dispensed to pickup points in Los Angeles.
With the limited growing season in many parts of the country, not to mention this year’s severe January freeze in Florida, such a transformation in what’s provided through food banks is far less practical. Sometimes, questionable rules also get in the way.
A few years ago, I had an oversupply of cherry and pear tomatoes in my garden. I was willing to have clients of the local food pantry come and pick as many as they wished because I didn’t have the time or inclination to do so but I was told that privacy protocols would be violated if that were done.
That excuse seemed out of line because anyone could stand on the sidewalk or in a parked vehicle and watch who enters a food pantry to pick up supplies. Whatever the situation or activity, it always seems that something that doesn’t make sense stands in the way of a solution. Maybe that’s why we have so many problems needing solutions in the first place.
