Food-aid plan more burden than benefit
From recipients to retailers, Trump meal-kit proposal drawing criticism
Steven Summers is a 61-yearold college graduate, has a parttime job with the Oakland Parks and Recreation Department, and survives in part on the $121 in food stamp benefits he gets every month. Just like 1 in 20 other Alameda County residents does.
He may get a few more dollars in his pocket because of the tax bill that President Trump signed last year. But what Trump giveth, Trump can take away: Summers stands to lose a lot more if the White House’s plan to gut funding for the food-aid program for the poorest Americans goes through.
The way that what’s officially known as the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP — works now is that 42 million Americans like Summers buy whatever meat, fruit, vegetables and other foodstuffs they want at 260,000 grocery stores nationwide by using a debit card that stores their benefits. Recipients can’t use food stamps to buy pet food, and they can’t use them to buy alcohol or cigarettes.
This week, the Trump administration proposed cutting the program by $260 billion over 10 years, or 30 percent. Half the savings would come by changing the way Summers and other recipients receive their food benefit.
Under the plan, half of Summers’ $121 a month would come in the form of a box of nonperishable food like peanut butter,
beans, pasta, cereal and canned products. The administration says the boxes would be filled with food “home grown by American farmers and producers.”
But don’t mistake this for farm-to-table fine dining. Under the plan, there would be no fresh fruit, vegetables or meat. This proposal is about enabling the government to save money by buying in bulk.
Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, compared this to a “Blue Apron-type program.” For you nonfoodies unfamiliar with Blue Apron, it’s a meal kit delivered with all of the ingredients tenderly wrapped and premeasured down to the last tablespoon of dukkah seasoning.
One of the meals on next week’s Blue Apron menu: “Beef Medallions and Scallion Salsa Verde with Potatoes and Broccoli.” It will include four beef medallions, a half-pound of fresh broccoli, two scallions, one lemon, one red onion, one clove of garlic, one-quarter teaspoon of red pepper flakes and one tablespoon of what the Blue Aproners describe as “Weeknight Hero Spice Blend (Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Smoked Paprika, & Whole Dried Parsley).”
Price per serving of a Blue Apron meal: $10. Price per serving of a SNAP meal: $1.40.
“I’ve never heard this idea from anywhere, and I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” said Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “This is saying to 34 million (SNAP beneficiaries potentially affected by the proposal), ‘Give us back half of your benefits. We’ll buy the food for you, and you won’t have any say in it.’ ”
Mulvaney says that this program is a way to cut fraud. Its defenders point out that the fraud rate in SNAP is low — less than 1 percent of benefits go to households that are ineligible.
The proposal leaves the administration vulnerable to accusations of political hypocrisy — after all, conservative mantra is that individuals, not government, should make decisions for themselves — but a larger stumbling block might be the cries of stores that now take SNAP benefits.
To put the value of this program in raw economic terms, $192 million in SNAP benefits last year went to 112,000 Alameda County residents like Summers, according to the Alameda County Community Food Bank. Big retailers like Walmart and Safeway aren’t going to be happy if the Trump Blue Apron Box becomes a reality and cuts into their grocery traffic. As those benefits circulate in Alameda County, they create $344 million in economic activity, according to the food bank.
Summers also worries about how people like him would physically deal with a big box of food that consists in large part of cans.
People like Summers have to go through a lot now to get their food. To make his benefits stretch, Summers makes weekly trips to a food pantry near the Oakland-Emeryville border on produce day.
It takes him 20 minutes to ride there on his bike. He waits up to an hour or so in line, then stuffs 20 pounds or so of carrots, onions and apples in his backpack and in bags draped from his handlebars. Then he rides home.
That ride would be a lot tougher under the administration’s proposal. And it wouldn’t be any easier for disabled people or senior citizens who get around on the bus.
“We’re talking about a box for a month that contains canned food. How big and heavy is something like that going to be?” Summers said. “Who is even going to be able to move that?”
Summers’ personal story isn’t unusual. In the East Bay, nearly half of recipients have jobs, like he does. Summers was unemployed for a time during the great recession, like countless others, and counted on food stamps to help him crawl out of being homeless for a year.
“I’m just tired of being poor,” Summers said. “I’m tired of the stress of it. Of just knowing that at any moment the bottom could drop out because of politics. Those kind of things that I have no control over.” Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli @sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
“We’re talking about a box for a month that contains canned food. How big and heavy is something like that going to be? Who is even going to be able to move that?” Steven Summers, food stamp recipient