The government's thrifty plan for food

Food stamps are issued based on the USDA's calculation of what a family of four with an annual income of $26,856 would need to eat nutritiously. AP writers, like the one who misled you all in the Tribune's May 16 article (Columbus Dispatch May 17) on Chicagoans using food stamps, say this can't be done with today's rising prices. Hogwash.

First of all, any family of 4 can eat on that plan even without food stamps, and the stamps will get them $542 worth of food a month. Buried at the bottom of the article (which is where truth is always found in an AP story, if it's there at all) is the crux of the matter: "carts filled with soda pop, bags of cookies, potato chips" because its cheaper for low income people to feed their families bad food than good food. Lie upon lie! Get this journalist to a library, or at least show him how to Google a dot gov site. Then have him walk the aisles of any supermarket with $500 in his hand and have him purchase ONLY real food--flour, sugar, shortening, apples, potatoes, tomatoes, rice, beans, oatmeal, peanut butter, milk, eggs, etc.; he'll be be stunned at how much food he can buy.

In the early 1980s I was writing about food budgets, coupons, sweepstakes, and other ways to play with your food, just as I do today in my blog, but using an electric typewriter, a bottle of white-out, research in the OSU Agriculture Library, and a photocopy machine to issue my own newsletter, No Free Lunch. I was interviewed on a local TV talk show, spoke to women's book clubs, a faculty lunch group at OSU, and I was featured in the local suburban newspaper. However, because my theme was in some ways anti-business and chiding the consumer for poor planning, I was not in great demand as a speaker or writer. You can't tell business that their methods are suspect and consumers that they are not behaving rationally and expect to be popular!

I was just as opinionated then as a liberal Democrat as I am today as a conservative Republican. I wrote a lot about how government and food conglomerates worked together to confuse or hurt the consumer and put the local food companies at a disadvantage (and I hadn't heard of a Wal-Mart). Actually, I still feel that way, but now wonder why Democrats continue to lull voters into thinking even more government control of their lives and wallets is beneficial. And I see how increased regulation of business hurts the little guy, and especially the poor.

In issue 8 of No Free Lunch I wrote about how the government determines the Food Stamp benefits and then I compared that to my own food purchases. I was a SAHM (I think I worked three hours a day at OSU on a temp contract), with 2 elementary school aged children, living in an upper middle class suburban neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. Here's what I wrote (all figures based on food costs in 1980, almost 30 years ago):

"Benefits on which the Food Stamp Program are based are adjusted to changes not in the Consumer Price Index, but in the cost of the "Thrifty Food Plan."

In January 1980 this plan allowed $49.60 for 2 parents and 2 elementary shcool aged children per week. My own food bill at that time was about $45 per week, including paper products and non-food items, not included in the government's Thrifty Food Plan.

How can my food bill be lower than "thrifty?" First, I don't use the menu on which the government's plan is based. A second consideration is "economy of size" (a misuse of the term)--my husband and I are not big people, so we don't require as much food as larger people.

I don't do any of the usual things promoted as cost saving--I don't comparison shop, I don't shop at a major food chain, and I try not to use coupons and refund schemes. I avoid highly promoted, expensive new products.

I do buy a higher proportion of my food fresh and unprocessed than the average shopper, and I contribute my own labor (which is not taxable). I do not buy prepared desserts and snacks, and that was the big jump in food expendistures in the last 15 years. We drink orange juice and egg nog instead of soft drinks. A garden or a freezer would help, but I'm satisfied that food in America is a very good buy."

So what does the AP writer in today's paper say about Food Stamps and the Thrifty Plan? Here it is, full of half-truths, myths, and gotcha's. The truth is our government has been crippling poor people for generations now with the best of intentions. Enmeshed with subsidized housing, government funded school breakfasts, lunches and after school snacks, summer lunch programs, food stamps, SCHIP health plans, church food pantries (almost all getting government grants to purchase food to give away) combined with an education system that expects failure, little or nothing from the students or parents, unmarried families (that's a huge penalty for the poor), and more and more "green" regulations that the poor can't even use or which will destroy their neighborhoods for redevelopment. How in the world do these people ever hope to climb out of this government made mess?

What using less than the thrifty plan looked like in 1981