Food boxes instead of food stamps

[Rita]

Wonder what kind of government-picked items would be in this box!  Kind of scary.   You just need to look at school lunches, where ketchup is a vegetable.   The special interest component would be huge if they went through with this!   I'm sure it would have lots of GMO corn and soy in there.  Canned vegetables that have lost all their nutrition.  A high carb diet I'm sure.   And think about the different food sensitivities people have.  Yikes.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/12/food-stamps-trump-administration-343245

[Bob Niland (Boundless)]

Rita: Wonder what kind of government-picked items would be in this box!

Why would you expect it to be anything other than by-the-book dogmatic MyPlateOfMetabolicSyndrome? Grain-heavy, high-carb, low-fat, low-salt, linoleic acid heavy, and sure all the other ills of industrial food-like substances: GMOs, preservatives, emulsifiers, colorants, artificial sweeteners.

If this initiative moves forward, it needs to become an opportunity to debate whether USDA-FNS should instead be told "you're fired". Somehow I doubt that will develop.

As a practical matter, forced feeding would screw the small minority who spend their food stamps wisely.

For the majority of the currently entitled, it would probably make little difference metabolically.

For a significant minority of current recipients, it would make it harder to game the system, and turn the food into cash and/or off-program items (often tobacco, booze, etc.) It is these latter who are likely motivating the proposal.
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Bob Niland [disclosures] [topics]

[Barbara from New Jersey]

This government program will be for the benefit of Big Food, not individuals.  It will consist of grains, sugars, processed anything convenient and canned....all the foods we don't eat.  Very profitable for business, very unhealthy for people.  I remember the breakfast, lunch and after school programs designed to nourish the poorer students as part of The Great Society Programs.  Plentiful supply of fruit juices, canned and sweetened fruits, sweet dry cereal, donuts and cookies, chocolate milk, and velveeta cheese on everything possible.  The children were in a stupor about 40 minutes after eating.  Lunch and after school snacks were simiar verisions.  The foods were free or low cost.  Theft was rampant.  Perhaps the worst part was the behavior problems which developed after the stupor wore off.  Soon followed by weight gain.  The only sign of anything fresh was an occasional apple, banana or orange. 


Packing and delivery services will cost more than the food.  Once delivered, the problem becomes theft. Poor neighborhoods aren't known for package safety.  Yet another bureaucracy will be needed to handle the claims while people go hungry.  A black market cottage industry will develop as it always does.  No surprise there.


A simpler and less expensive idea would be to have acceptable food item bar codes programmed into the cards or to food stores.  Basic staple food items like dairy, eggs, meat, vegetables, beans are paid for by the card.  Other items are not and must be paid by cash or a credit card. Of course, the goal is not to feed the poorer folks, but to provide more sales to Big Food. 


The Blue Apron box contains a step by step recipe and ingredients for that 1 meal.  People still have to cook their meal.  The ingredients are packaged so that they remain refrigerator cold for hours.  It helps if your apartment building has concierge service so that if you are delayed, your box will not be stolen or damaged.  Only Trump's wealthy staff could think this was a good example of how to feed poor people! 




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[Bob Niland (Boundless)]

Barbara from New Jersey: A simpler and less expensive idea would be to have acceptable food item bar codes programmed into the cards or to food stores.  Basic staple food items like dairy, eggs, meat, vegetables, beans are paid for by the card.

My impression is that the present system already works like that. A family member, however, reports seeing the cards used for purchase of approved foods in peculiar amounts, followed by mysterious transactions out in the parking lot. And the card holders in these apparent abuse scenarios always seem to have high-end smart-phones, fancy cars, and smoke.

On the other issues you raise, yup. This whole initiative is just another futile effort to correct the unintended consequences of earlier unintended consequences, all of which can be traced back to defective basic government policy (on both nutrition and personal responsibility). Failed regulation is merely aggravated by even more regulation.

Unless DGA is fixed, Food Stamp tweaks are doomed. And politically, DGA cannot be fixed. It needs to be recanted and abandoned, with prejudice.
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Bob Niland [disclosures] [topics]

[Barbara from New Jersey]

Bob,


You are quite correct about people who "game" the system.  They will always be there to take advantage in the cleverest of ways.  The underground economy is very strong and prolific.  You might have read that there was a recent discovery of Puerto Rican warehouses full of food, water and other basics provided by FEMA which just disappeared from the distribution chain even with the world watching.


Making honest taxpayers cringe even more is the efforts by parent(s) to get their children classified as disabled by a school system so that they can collect Social Security Disability payments.  There isn't any end to the greediness at any level. 


We all know that there isn't any" free lunch."  Those who eat the grains, sugars, processed and fast food will pay a horrid price in their health and quality of life in a few years.  Recent immigrants cook and bring recipes from their old countries.  Seems that the second and third generation immigrants who remain poor and government subsidized eat most of the processed food which can be purchased with food stamps.  The bar codes aren't specific enough at the moment to prevent this.  The good news is that they can be coded better.  The bad news is that the current administration will want Big Food as suppliers.  No one is actually minding the store and so the farce will continue until people demand better government and food.

[Rita]

Good points Bob and Barbara. 

Think about enforcing and managing something like this.  And what department would make those decisions?   

My gut says nothing will change.