Thanksgiving week, Joel was asked by the New York Times City Room Blog to answer select readers’ questions about what New Yorkers can do to end hunger in the city. Questions generally fell into the following four categories: 1) how can I volunteer or donate food?; 2) why do poor people eat so badly?; 3) come on now, is there really hunger?; and 4) readers wanting to know the extent and cost to society of hunger. Joel found it telling that few readers asked him to write about the governmental policies that create and/or sustain hunger.
This week, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) published a paper by Joel Berg and Tom Freedman, “Ending Child Hunger in America” for their “Memos to the Next President” series. If you would like to read the entire paper, click here. PPI’s press release on this paper is listed below:
PPI | Press Release | November 24, 2008 ENDING CHILD HUNGER CAN STIMULATE THE ECONOMY New PPI Report: The Next Administration Should Overhaul Federal Nutrition Programs and Stimulate Economy For Immediate Release
WASHINGTON — In the long term, a well-fed population performs better in school, works more productively, and spends less on health care. According to a new PPI report, efforts to end hunger now would also directly improve the economy faster than Bush’s 2008 stimulus package and streamline federal bureaucracy.
As families across the country sit down for a Thanksgiving feast this week, more than 12 million American children still go without Tfood each year. The statistics are frightening:
in 2007, food inflation was at its worst level in 17 years;
food prices rose nearly twice as much last year as the 15-year average;
one in six children lived below the poverty line;
12.4 million children lived in households that could not always afford enough food; and
nearly 700,000 of those children suffered directly from not getting enough to eat.
These are the latest statistics, but they do not even account for our economy’s more recent meltdown.
The latest in PPI’s Memos to the Next President series, ”Ending Child Hunger in America,” lays out a plan to wipeout childhood hunger while stimulating the ailing economy. Authors Joel Berg and Tom Freedman encourage President-Elect Obama to fulfill his campaign pledge to end child hunger by 2015 by making changes that, in addition to ending hunger, would reduce federal bureaucracy; reward work; increase school attendance; incentivize state innovation; and stimulate the economy.
While President Bush’s stimulus package put money into the hands of many people who did not need it or did not spend the money immediately, increased spending on federal nutrition programs like food stamps would have much more immediate effects than rebates. Money would go to all those involved in growing, processing, shipping, and retailing food. In fact, Reagan advisor Martin Feldstein, Clinton administration treasury secretary Robert Rubin, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke all agree that increased federal spending on food stamp benefits is actually one of the fastest ways to stimulate the economy and can affect spending in just two months. You can read the whole Memo at www.ppionline.org.
In the Memo, Berg and Freedman illustrate the existing hunger crisis in America and outline the five steps that the next president can take to end hunger:
1. Provide all children with a free school breakfast.
Only 20 percent of children eligible for free school breakfasts actually receive them, largely because of the logistical hurdles and the stigma of a breakfast “for the poor kids.” Offering free breakfast in public schools to all children would ensure that every hungry child is fed without discrimination.
Pilot universal breakfast programs showed a decrease in absenteeism and visits to the school nurses, along with fewer children falling asleep in class.
Universal breakfast programs save time and money for the school district by reducing the paperwork and bureaucracy involved in processing the complex system of eligibility forms and income data used to qualify for the free breakfast program.
2. Improve Program Efficiency and Accountability.
Food programs are currently so complicated that Americans struggling to eat often have to take time off work to even apply, reducing the number of eligible families who receive food. The tangled web of programs and separate applications end up costing the government bureaucratic time and money.
The federal labyrinth of food program applications should be streamlined into a single application for multiple programs, such as the Special Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); food stamps; school meals; and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Currently, food stamps pay barely $3 a day per person for food. The savings from a streamlined application process can be put towards improving the quality of food the programs provide.
The Secretary of Agriculture should be charged with responsibility for achieving quantifiable results in reducing hunger, showing this is a genuine priority of your administration.
3. Support working Families.
Congress recently approved a modest hike in the minimum wage, but it does not match the booming inflation, resulting in low-income families’ continuing struggle to earn enough to eat as our economy worsens.
To ensure that all working families can afford to feed our nation’s children, we must first index the minimum wage to the rising cost of living. Second, we must expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and make sure that it offers men as well as women strong rewards for work.
4. Reward Best Practices in the States.
State governments often serve as the testing grounds for innovative programs. The next president should establish programs to reward state innovation in combating hunger and improving nutrition. For example, the USDA could finance bonuses to the five states that show the greatest reduction in USDA measures of food insecurities and hunger. The bonuses would serve as an incentive to other states, and could be used to expand and improve anti-hunger programs in the winning states.
5. Provide Real Ammo to the Armies of Compassion.
In May 2008, Feeding America, the nation’s largest food-bank network, reported an estimated 15 percent to 20 percent increase in clients. A staggering 84 percent of food banks were unable to meet the growing need due to a combination of increased demand, decreased government aid, and soaring food prices.
The next administration should encourage partnerships with these dedicated nonprofit groups who can increase the government’s reach with food distribution, training programs, Earned Income Tax Credit, and food stamps outreach, as well as other self-sufficiency programs.
In return, the government should provide assistance such as funding, technical aid, staff support, and surplus property and real estate.
You can read the full text of “Ending Hunger in America,” along with the entire Memos to the Next President series, at www.ppionline.org.
For questions on “Ending Hunger in America,” or for comment from co-authors Joel Berg and Tom Freedman, contact Alice McKeon, PPI Press Secretary, at (202) 608-1232 or amckeon@dlc.org.
The Progressive Policy Institute’s mission is to define and promote a new progressive politics for America in the 21st century. Through its research, policies, and commentary, the Institute is fashioning a new governing philosophy and an agenda for public innovation geared to the Information Age. For additional information, web users may access the Progressive Policy Institute at www.ppionline.org, or contact PPI’s press office at (202) 547-0001.
One of PPI’s dear friends and well known anti-hunger warrior, Joel Berg, has released a timely new book in which he offers a blueprint to end domestic hunger. In All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America, Joel suggests how President-elect Obama and the new Congress can immediately offer relief to the millions of Americans who have been forced to join the lines at soup kitchens and food pantries in urban, rural and even suburban communities across the country.
Joel has an extensive background in hunger issues, working for the Clinton Administration in the Department of Agriculture and as executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. And for those who know him, his passion for the issue is unparalleled. Therefore, it was no surprise to read this review:
With the biting wit of Supersize Me and the passion of a lifelong activist, Joel Berg has his eye on the growing number of people who are forced to wait in the nation’s modern breadlines. All You Can Eat reveals that hunger is a problem as American as apple pie and shows what it is like when your income is not enough to cover rising housing and living costs and put food on the table at the same time. Berg takes to task politicians who remain inactive; the media, which ignores hunger except during holidays and hurricanes; and the food industry, which makes fattening, artery-clogging fast food more accessible to the nation’s poor than healthy fare. He even chides organic food gurus such as Michael Pollan and Alice Waters for claiming that the recent increases in food costs are a positive development at the same time as low-income American are unable to afford enough healthy food.
If you are in the DC area, you should stop by Joel’s two book events on Monday:
DC Central Kitchen
10:00 am 425 2nd Street NW
Busboys and Poets
6:30 pm 1025 5th Street NW
Also, stay tuned for a “Memo to the Next President” that he co-authored with Tom Freedman on how the new Obama Administration can take steps to end domestic child hunger.
The Moving Upblog is a product of the Progressive Policy Institute’sSocial Mobility Project. Their goal is to create a space for a respectful policy discussion on poverty and social mobility.
36 Million Americans, Including 12 Million Children, at Risk
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported today that 700,000 more Americans couldn’t afford a full and stable supply of food in 2007 than in 2006. The USDA data confirmed that there were 36.2 million Americans – including 12 million children – who were “food insecure” in 2007 even before the current economic slowdown. The rapidly increasing lines at food pantries and soup kitchens nationwide indicate that the problem is considerably worse now than it was in 2007. (Please view the full report online here.)
Over the 2005-2007 time period, the percentage of households in New York State suffering from the greatest hunger – what USDA now calls “very low food security” – increased slightly, from 3.2 to 3.3 percent. The overall number of food insecure households dipped slightly statewide, from 10.5 to 9.9 households. That means that, throughout the state – even when factoring in relatively wealthy areas such as the suburbs and the Upper East Side – about one in ten families couldn’t afford enough food even when the economy was still strong in 2005-2007. USDA has not yet released 2005-2007 data for New York City alone.
Said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, “Given that hunger and food insecurity were rampant in America and New York when they overall economy was still strong in the previous few years, it is no wonder that, during this economic meltdown, New York City is starting to face a full-blown hunger emergency, with more and more pantries and kitchens running out of food and unable to meet the growing demand.
(Press release put out by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, 11/17/08)
While American conservatives are busy abandoning one principle after another, they are sticking to their guns on one tried and true unifying concern: shafting poor people.
Keeping to their mantra that poor people are always to blame for whatever ails the nation, conservatives won’t let go of their obsessive fear that low-income Americans are somehow so adept at scamming society, they are secretly taking charge of the nation, despite having less money and power than everyone else. Ignoring rampant misconduct by the rich, conservatives whip the nation into anti-poor person frenzy with overblown charges of fraud, and use those charges as a pretext to further deny basic rights to low-income Americans, ranging from the right to vote to the right to obtain food stamp benefits.
Given all the massive Right-wing fear-mongering over supposed liberal schemes to rig the election by enabling large numbers of low-income (read: non-white) people to illegally vote, you’d never know that actual voter fraud is virtually non-existent in America.
According to a recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, (as quoted in Rolling Stone by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast), federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. “The claim of widespread voter fraud,” Minnite says, “is itself a fraud.”
Conversely, the conservative establishment has gone to great lengths to make it difficult for low-income Americans to register and cast votes. That is why the miniscule number of people who illegally vote is dwarfed by the tens of millions eligible people prevented or discouraged from voting.
Likewise, conservative howls about supposed widespread food stamps fraud mask a much more pervasive problem, namely that social service laws and bureaucracies are so punitive and Byzantine that they prevent and discourage tens of millions of low-income Americans from getting the food stamp benefits (recently re-named Supplemental Nutrition Assistance — SNAP — benefits) to which they are legally entitled.
Despite the soaring lines at food pantries and soup kitchens nationwide — and despite the reality that more than 35 million Americans (many of whom work or recently lost work) can’t afford enough food, nearly one in three people eligible for USDA-funded food stamp benefits fail to receive them. In comparison, I have never heard of so much as one person eligible for Social Security retirement benefits who did not start receiving them after turning 65. While both Social Security and food stamp benefits are funded by taxpayers, the government acts on the assumption that every Social Security applicant is virtuous and deserving (and therefore makes it easy for folks to get benefits) while assuming that every food stamp applicant is a potential crook (and makes it min-numbingly hard to receive and keep benefits).
Federal law, as well as extra rules piled on by states, counties, and cities, often make the process of applying for foods stamps a Kafka-esque nightmare. New York State’s handbook for administering the Food Stamp Program is 391 pages long. While the State has bragged that it recently reduced the application form from 16 to five pages, in New York City, even people who fill out the shorter form are still required to verbally provide caseworkers the answers to up to hundreds of questions. People are even asked if they owned funeral plots; In New York, if you owned one, that would not count against food stamps eligibility, but if you owned two, it could count against your eligibility. An information sheet printed by USDA used to encourage potential applications to apply for food stamps lists 27 different categories for the types of documents that an applicant might need to physically bring to a food stamps office to prove their eligibility. And that handout is an outreach tool that is supposed to encourage participation.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, food stamp applicants are required to provide finger images (electronic fingerprints) in four of the nation’s largest states (California, Texas, New York, and Arizona), further treating them like criminals. It is not coincidental that people never have to be finger-printed to obtain other types of USDA aid that goes to less poor (and often rich) people, such as farm subsidies, money to ranchers for conservation programs, and payments to rural business owners.
There are a lot of bad governmental policies out there, but few rise to the level of sheer stupidity as this one does. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, which has resisted the State’s attempt to roll back finger-imaging for working families, claims that the practice deters fraud and that it has no negative impact upon legitimate applicants. Neither claim is true. Even under the Bush administration, the USDA has found no proof that finger-printing significantly reduces fraud and has expressed worries that it may deter people from applying. The four states that do require finger-images have higher rates of payment error and lower rates of participation than those that don’t. It’s a lose-lose situation. For all those reasons, 46 of the nation’s 50 states don’t waste their tax dollars on such an inefficient and degrading system.
The Urban Institute found that, in one out of 23 cases, otherwise eligible people don’t apply solely due to finger-imaging requirements. New York City detected only 31 cases of suspected fraud thanks to fingerprinting in 2006. Given that about 1.1 million people in the city received food stamps, that meant that only one in 34,991 Food Stamp Program applicants were caught in the act of potentially committing fraud by finger-imaging. Thus, to seize possible fraud by only one in nearly 35,000 people, the City denied benefits to one in 23 actual hungry people.
There are a number of effective methods to fight fraud already in use, other than finger-
Imaging — such as computer matching. Fraud detection is important, but it is crucial to point out that, when large-scale fraud does occur in the Food Stamp Program (an occurrence far less common than 10 years ago), the perpetrators are usually food retailers (who fraudulently bill the government for non-existent customers) or government employees (who fabricate non-existent households). Duplicate cases created by individual food stamps recipients — the only type of fraud potentially detected by finger-imaging — comprises a relatively small percentage of government money lost due to fraud.
Still, Mayor Bloomberg — trying to get political credit for opposing so-called fraud — goes to absurd lengths to catch those 31 potential cases of fraud, spending $800,000 of scarce City tax dollars each year on finger-imaging. That’s right, the City spends $800,000 of its own money on a system that may prevent 31 people from getting benefits for which they are not entitled, even though it prevents 21,500 people from getting $31 million in federal benefits for which they are entitled.
Yet just like with fake warnings of voter fraud, trumped-up claims of food stamps fraud let conservatives change the subject. Let’s turn the subject back to voting rights and the need to ensure that all families have enough to eat.
While I agree with many of Pollan’s continuing criticisms of a world food system dominated by just a handful of corporate agribusinesses, I am troubled by his continuing insensitivity to the realities faced by low-income Americans. My reply, to be printed in the October 26, 2008 magazine, speaks for itself:
Even though 35.5 million Americans live in households that can’t afford enough food and 25 million are forced to use food pantries and soup kitchens, Michael Pollan insists that food scarcity is no longer a problem in America and that rising food prices can be a positive development. He glosses over the reality that the nation’s rising obesity is directly tied to the inability of low-income Americans to physically obtain and economically afford less fattening, more nutritious foods.
Pollan’s suggestion that the federal government start preventing low-income families from using food-stamp benefits to purchase what he deems to be junk food is as class-biased as it is unworkable. In his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he admits that he and his son occasionally enjoy junk food and supersize Cokes. Who is he to decide that low-income American families could never again enjoy that same guilty pleasure?
I, too, would like to live in a nation in which everyone is able to buy nourishing food year-round at “four-season farmers’ markets.” But just as the reality is that most Americans don’t live in regions with year-round growing seasons, tens of millions of people on limited incomes simply can’t afford to buy the healthiest foods.
The answer is not, as Pollan suggests, to reduce their already meager choices but rather to ensure that they have wages high enough and a government safety net robust enough to give them the real-life ability to eat more nutritious foods.”
You can see my published letter, as well as an excellent letter from a previous boss of mine, former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, here.
A few other related points:
Pollan is wrong to claim that the WIC and School Lunch Programs value raw calorie counts over nutritional content. The foods purchased through the WIC program were recently re-calibrated to conform with nutritional guidelines established by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, offering fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, soymilk, and tofu as options for the first time.
Under federal law, school lunches must be served in accordance with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, ensuring that less than 10 percent of calories come from saturated fat and requiring that each lunch provides at least one-third of the recommended levels of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, iron, and calcium. Yes, school lunches are still far from perfect, and yes parents and activists need to be vigilant in continuing to improve their nutritional quality, but we should at least acknowledge the nutritional advances. And we should remember how much worse off low-income children were before they had access to school lunches at all.
With billions of dollars at stake, the battle to define junk food in the Food Stamp Program would be epic, with nutrition experts pitted against food-industry lobbyists, slugging it out one food item at a time. Are Raisinets junk food or fruit? Junk food, you say? Then how about a caramel apple? What about a Fig Newton? Wouldn’t it be better to let parents decide for themselves?
It is also wrong to imply that the Food Stamp Program increases obesity. A major USDA study published in 2007 found no significant difference between the body mass index of people who received food stamps and people who were equally poor who did not.
Micromanaging the lives of poor people—or anybody, for that matter—is patronizing and usually backfires. A far better strategy than limiting food choice with food stamps, banning fast food, or passing a “fat tax” is to increase the average benefit amount of food stamps so people can afford to buy the healthiest foods—which most food stamp recipients desperately want to do.
I discusss all these issues in greater detail in my book.
USA Today reports: “Local authorities say the number of families seeking help has risen in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Washington.”
The Obama/Biden campaign issued a detailed (two and a half page) statement this week on how they would end child hunger in the U.S. by 2005. Given that 35.5 million Americans – including more than 12 million children – live in homes that can’t afford enough food, this is a huge issue.
On May 4, 2008, Obama said on Meet the Press: “We’ve got rising food prices here in the United States. My top priority is making sure that people are able to get enough to eat.”
Focusing first on the most vulnerable populations by ensuring that low-income senior citizens, infants, and toddlers have more access to federal nutrition assistance benefits;
Enacting a serious, multi-pronged plan to slash U.S. poverty, which has soared under the Bush Administration;
Eliminating child hunger by 2015 by providing all poor children with free school meals and expanding summer meals for low-income children; and
Increasing support to community-based providers, such as food banks, soup kitchens, and food pantries, both faith-based and secular.
On the same day that Obama issued his statement on domestic hunger, the McCain campaign also issued the following statement: “John McCain supports fully funding food and nutrition programs and carrying out a robust Emergency Food Assistance Program. He supports indexing food stamps to reflect the current cost of living and he would fill shortfalls in the Emergency Food Assistance Program. John McCain also supports providing marketing tools for the fruit and vegetable industry focused on promoting healthier American diets.”
If McCain is for a “robust Emergency Food Assistance Program” (which aids food banks, soup kitchens and food pantries) why did he vote in 2005 (as part of GOP-sponsored across-the-board cuts) to cut that very program? Why, in the same 2005 vote, did cut the WIC Program, which provides specially-targeted nutrition assistance and health advice to pregnant women and infants?
How in the world does McCain square his position that he is for across-the-board cuts in all non-homeland security domestic spending with his call for “fully funding” nutrition programs and indexing food stamps to inflation? (As an anti-hunger advocate, I certainly support increases in these programs but that could cost billions of dollars extra per year, which would seem to be at odds with “across-the-board cuts”)
