Pod Insights Gastropod SNAP To It! Why Food Stamps Matter To All of Us—And Why They're Under Threat About this episode SNAP—the federal assistance program better known as food stamps—helps put food on the table of nearly one in eight Americans today. But, as new legislation is phased in over the coming months, more than half of those people are expected to lose some or all of their SNAP benefits. This episode, we're getting to the bottom of why SNAP matters—to all of us, not just those who receive it. Why does the U. S. government give people money just for food, rather than cash, as in other countries? Does it make sense to ban SNAP from being used to buy junk food? And why are so many people still hungry, when American farmers produce more food than we can even eat? For decades, the food stamp program has been the main way the U. S. government puts food on the tables of folks who would otherwise struggle to afford it; for all of those decades, it's been attacked, resented, and subject to political horse-trading. Listen in now, as we explore how SNAP has survived for so long—and whether it's worth saving today.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:23 Cynthia Graber? For decades, food stamps have been shorthand for needing some government help to get by.
0:27 Nicola Twilley? And for all of those decades, they've been relied on, but they've also been resented, vilified, and threatened. Even though food stamps themselves technically haven't existed for the past 20 years.
0:39 Cynthia Graber? That's because it's called SNAP today, and people are still fighting over it.
0:43 Speaker 02 Millions of low-income Americans are receiving the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP. They're getting hit with a massive change, a lot of them, in fact, that go into effect today. And it comes as Trump's one big, beautiful bill cut nearly $190 billion in funding to the program.
1:00 Nicola Twilley? We'll get into what those changes are later in the show, but this is just the most recent battle in an ongoing war about if and how we should help feed the hungry here in America.
1:10 Cynthia Graber? We are going to find out who wins and who loses here at Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber.
1:18 Nicola Twilley? And I'm Nicola Twilley. And this episode, we are all in on welfare queens and government cheese on our quest to figure out whether SNAP works.
1:27 Cynthia Graber? Why does our government give people money just for food instead of cash? Does it work better that way? And does it make sense to limit the food that this assistance can be used for, like by banning sodas and candy bars?
1:37 Nicola Twilley? Why are people still hungry when American farmers produce more food than we can even eat? And are food stamps meant to help deal with that surplus?
1:46 Cynthia Graber? All that, plus a heck of a lot of prunes, as we try to make sense of one of America's oldest and weirdest government food programs. This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.
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3:23 Speaker 05 On the 24th of October, 1929, all America's illusions exploded in her face. The United States was hurled from incredible wealth to days poverty in a single afternoon.
3:37 Nicola Twilley? In general, the 1930s were a disastrous time in America.
3:41 Speaker 06 Black Tuesday, the bottom dropped out and the market crashed. Jobs, savings, and homes were wiped out. The Great Depression was here. You had widespread deprivation. You had entire communities where people were without income and often without food. You have urban centers where you have massive unemployment and there's no safety net to speak of.
4:07 Cynthia Graber? Christopher Basso is professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern and author of the book, Why Snap Works: A Political History and Defense of the Food Program. To understand where SNAP comes from, we have to go back to this time in history, to the Great Depression, when about a third of Americans were hungry. And like Chris says, there was no real system to get food to them.
4:26 Speaker 06 I mean, some states and localities have relief agencies with some modest, very modest cash assistance and modest other kinds of assistance. But it was a much thinner, much more feeble welfare state than even we think we have today, which made the deprivation that much more visible. At the same time, you have this paradox that farmers were overproducing food. And this has been happening for years.
4:53 Nicola Twilley? American farms had become much more productive with the introduction of tractors and synthetic fertilizer. But no one had the money to buy the food they produced anymore because Americans were broke.
5:03 Speaker 06 First of all, the depression decreased demand. When people make less money, they're going to buy cheaper and less food. You also had a global depression which decreased the demand in the export market.
5:16 Cynthia Graber? Herbert Hoover was the president at the beginning of the 30s, when there were all these agricultural surpluses that nobody was buying. Farmers were begging for government intervention. The cost of harvesting crops was more than they sold for. Hoover was reluctant to get involved, but he did decide to have the government buy up some of the wheat that otherwise would rot in the field.
5:35 Nicola Twilley? But he didn't know what to do with it. Fortunately, Hoover lost the 1932 election, so it wasn't his problem anymore. And the new president, Franklin Roosevelt, his administration had to deal with this mountain of surplus wheat.
5:48 Speaker 06 So they gave the wheat, over the opposition originally of the flour millers and wheat industry, they gave the wheat to the Red Cross, which distributed the wheat, the surplus wheat, to local relief agencies in the various states. But this was a one-off. They decided this was a one-off kind of thing.
6:04 Cynthia Graber? So the issue of a glut of crops was still a problem, and there was no system to deal with it. People were hungry, farmers weren't making money, and food was going to waste.
6:13 Nicola Twilley? This whole time was kind of a shocking moment in American history. People were standing in lines for hours at soup kitchens, but then farmers had these immense surpluses that nobody could afford to buy.
6:24 Speaker 06 So you have this paradox, again. You have, on one hand, farmers being terribly productive. You know, the United States is a place of immense resources. And you have this overproduction of crops and animals.
6:39 Speaker 06 Leading to literally massive surpluses of everything. And on the other side, you have people literally standing in red lines, palling through piles of potatoes.
6:48 Nicola Twilley? It was really not a good look. All this hunger and yet all this perfectly good food going to waste. And it was about to get worse.
6:56 Cynthia Graber? First, the government decided to buy those crops themselves so the farmers would have some income. For example, they bought up all the extra pigs farmers couldn't sell.
7:03 Speaker 06 But then instead of, you know, giving it away as pork, they would, you know, turn it into sludge and fertilizer.
7:09 Nicola Twilley? Nearly 80% of all pigs slaughtered in the US in 1933 to 1934 were destroyed. Their meat wasn't eaten.
7:18 Speaker 06 You started seeing the same thing with milk. You would just pour milk down the drain, literally. Or grain, you would burn the grain. This outraged people. Nobody was happy about the idea of destroying food while there's hunger.
7:30 Cynthia Graber? Roosevelt had to do something different. He instructed a secretary of agriculture and other farm experts to come up with some plans. One thing they considered was paying farmers not to produce particular crops on some of their land. But the farmers hated that idea. They didn't want the government telling them what to do.
7:45 Nicola Twilley? Another option was for the government to intervene and set the prices of commodities like wheat and milk so that farmers could make a decent living. But that kind of price fixing wasn't a popular solution either.
7:56 Speaker 06 Well, objections were that you had a 25% unemployment and massive inability of people to afford food. And here's the dilemma for government. I mean, you want prices to be high enough that farmers can make a living. Okay, fair enough. You want food to be inexpensive enough so that consumers can buy it. Notice the tension.
8:16 Cynthia Graber? So the government decided that they'd buy up the extra food. This helped keep the prices from plunging. And then they'd give away the surplus that they used tax money to buy.
8:24 Speaker 06 This is the important point. They're going to give that food away to those who need it, as determined by local relief agencies. It's the box, literally the box of food that you might think of as a food pantry today.
8:35 Nicola Twilley? So far, so great. But although this plan sounds simple, take the surplus, give it to the hungry. In practice, there were some challenges. There just wasn't a good national distribution network to store and share the Harvest in an efficient way.
8:50 Cynthia Graber? And then another problem was that these boxes weren't put together thinking through like what a family might need to get them through the week. It was really just, okay, what do we have too much of? Let's ship that out.
8:59 Speaker 06 And sometimes people got stuff they didn't like or didn't know how to prepare. So you would literally sometimes get, you know, 30 pounds of citrus fruit in your box and maybe some cabbage. There are famous stories of Midwestern grandmothers getting, you know, grapefruit and not knowing how to prepare a grapefruit and boiling the grapefruit because they didn't know what it was.
9:20 Nicola Twilley? In May 1938, lucky families in Chicago got four pounds of prunes, two pounds of dried beans, and 12 pounds of cabbage, which I guess at least would have kept them regular.
9:32 Cynthia Graber? It wasn't just the people on the receiving end who had some issues with these boxes, though. Shop owners weren't fans either because the people who got them were less likely to go to the neighborhood grocer, or certainly at least they'd spend less money there.
9:44 Speaker 06 And so you can imagine retailers are very upset. It's like competition as far as they're concerned. You're giving away food that you already spend taxpayers' money on. Meanwhile, the local retailers are struggling because people don't have the money to spend in their stores.
9:58 Nicola Twilley? This wasn't just a gripe. It was a real problem. Flower millers, bakers, and retailers had all taken a severe hit when that initial one-off government purchase and donation of wheat to the Red Cross took place.
10:09 Cynthia Graber? In theory, the government could have helped out farmers and also given money, cash directly to poor people so they could buy food, which would have supported both local stores and farmers, but no.
10:18 Speaker 06 A lot of, frankly, a lot of Southern conservatives opposed the idea, conservatives in particular, but Southern conservatives especially, really opposed the idea of giving cash to poor people. There was a racial dimension of this in the South, as you can imagine, but not just the South. But it was also just, there's also this visceral not wanting to give cash to poor people because they didn't think poor people would spend the cash wisely. And that's where the idea of the food stamp program comes from.
10:41 Nicola Twilley? The basic idea behind the food stamp program was to have poor people use vouchers to pay for food. The way it was set up was kind of a complicated system. People would use orange vouchers to pay for regular food and blue vouchers to pay for surplus foods, and they'd have to buy some of those vouchers, the orange ones.
10:59 Speaker 06 I would come into my relief agency and I would have to spend a dollar at minimum. And in return for the dollar, I would get a dollar's worth of orange stamps. And I could use those orange stamps at any food item in the store, just like cash. But I would get 50 cents in a bonus of blue stamps. And the blue stamps could be used for any food in the store declared surplus that month by the US government.
11:24 Cynthia Graber? The idea was that you'd keep buying your normal food. That's why you had those orange stamps that you'd paid for. And then you'd get extra free bonus, the blue stamps that you could use on surpluses. That was to boost the spending of poor people and to give them more food, but they'd have to use that extra spending only on surpluses, like, say, prunes.
11:42 Speaker 06 You would go to the store and there's a box of prunes on the shelf and it's 25 cents, let's say. You would use your blue stamps of 25 cents of your blue stamps to purchase that box of prunes, just like maybe your neighbor using regular currency would use the same amount of regular currency, 25 cents, to purchase the same box. It's the same box, no different, the same price, it's just different form of currency.
12:08 Nicola Twilley? And then the retailers took all the stamps, blue and orange, to the bank and the bank gave them cash and billed the government, AKA the taxpayer. It all sounds a little complicated, but Chris says it actually worked really pretty well.
12:21 Speaker 06 People today may be surprised to know it was actually very popular for a couple of reasons. One, it reduced the stigma of standing in line for the box of food. Do not underestimate how much people hate that idea of standing in line for a box of food. It's demoralizing.
12:36 Cynthia Graber? And when it came to the box, you didn't have any choice. At least with the food stamps, you could choose if you wanted surplus prunes or surplus cabbage. And people using those stamps could do their shopping at a regular grocery store, just like everyone else in the neighborhood. And so retailers loved it, too.
12:50 Speaker 06 Did it make a huge dent in the surplus? Maybe not, but it stimulated more consumption and stimulated the markets. And so it was very popular.
13:01 Nicola Twilley? In fact, it was so popular that the government ran out of money to pay for it. They hadn't anticipated the demand.
13:07 Cynthia Graber? At its peak at the time, there were about 4 million people using food stamps. And studies showed they ate better and healthier diets compared to people who didn't have that assistance. They tended to use the extra blue stamps on more expensive proteins like eggs and pork, and they bought fresh fruits and Vegetables when those were available.
13:24 Nicola Twilley? The food stamp program was launched in May 1939, and despite its evident success and popularity, it ended just a few years later in March 1943.
13:35 Speaker 06 Because what happens with the war is the war stimulates consumption. It does a couple of things. One, it reduces the surplus because now US is shipping food to its military overseas. It's shipping food to its allies. So you're reducing the surplus on one hand. Demand at home has risen because people are making money in the war industries. Everybody's employed now, and so there's no surplus, hardly any surplus to speak of.
13:59 Cynthia Graber? But we do have food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, what food stamps eventually turned into, we still have that today. And it's grown far beyond Roosevelt's wildest imagination. How'd we get here? That story after the break.
14:15 Speaker 05 Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.
14:36 Speaker 07 We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.
15:00 Speaker 05 This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder.
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16:33 Speaker 05 Using planting machines, these modern tillers of the soil believe in mass production.
16:40 Speaker 05 The job doesn't stop with nightfall. American farmers are working overtime to produce the food to win the war.
16:48 Nicola Twilley? World War II may have killed the food stamp, but it also sowed the seeds of its resurrection. After ramping up during the war, after the war, American farmers were producing more than ever before.
17:00 Speaker 06 You also have less food being shipped over to our former allies because they're producing their own food again. So they're again, once again, farmers are out producing the marketplace.
17:09 Cynthia Graber? And to make it worse or better, depending on your perspective, farmers became even more effective at farming in the 50s because, and we've talked about this many times on Gastropod before, this is when industrial agriculture really kicked into gear. War machines were repurposed in the fields. Wartime chemicals were repurposed as pesticides and herbicides. Farm production soared, and so did those surpluses.
17:30 Speaker 06 That's also where international food aid comes from, in the 1953 Food for Peace program.
17:37 Cynthia Graber? We have a whole episode on this called "How the US Became the World's Biggest Food Aid Donor." You should check it out.
17:42 Nicola Twilley? But there was just so much food that the government couldn't give it away fast enough.
17:47 Speaker 05 With grain elevators glutted by near-record wheat crops, the government turns to the mothball merchant fleets to solve the problem of storing 30 million bushels of surplus wheat.
17:56 Speaker 06 So the government's buying surpluses and storing them in big warehouses. And you just have massive amounts of food being stored.
18:04 Cynthia Graber? And it was costing the government a total fortune to store that food. It cost billions of dollars.
18:10 Speaker 06 It was, I think, the second or third biggest non-defense expenditure the government had by 1960. It was that big.
18:18 Nicola Twilley? Meanwhile, hunger in America still existed. It wasn't anywhere near depression levels, but in 1955, the USDA estimated that more than 1 in 10 Americans was so poor that their diets were deficient. And gradually, people were starting to talk about this issue of hunger again. Some Democratic senators had been trying to bring back food stamps.
18:40 Cynthia Graber? Including then-Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. By 1960, he was already on the campaign trail, and fighting hunger was a major part of his platform. He talked about it when he was campaigning in West Virginia.
18:51 Speaker 05 Well, now, one of the things which we send abroad is surplus food. I've been the sponsor, some of the other senators have sponsored a food stamp bill. So that these people who are older and who have not been able to find a job, if they're going to receive assistance, it ought to be assistance they can use.
19:05 Speaker 06 Kennedy, in his own travels in the 1960 election, begins to see these pockets of poverty in Appalachia in particular, and is really troubled by that. So you have, by 1960, a growing consensus, among Democrats in particular, but even among some Republicans, of the need to do something about surplus on one side and growing awareness of there's hunger on the other side.
19:29 Nicola Twilley? Spoiler alert: Kennedy won the Democratic convention and then the election, and he promised to take Americans to the moon, but also to deal with America's recurring surplus and hunger issue.
19:41 Speaker 05 The new frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier...
19:48 Speaker 05 Our uncharted areas of science and space, unfold problems of peace and war, unconquered province of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.
20:03 Cynthia Graber? When Kennedy became president, he launched pilots around the country to try out a renewed food stamp program. These totally did away with the two different colored stamps because, at this point, it was really more about the poverty than the surplus.
20:15 Speaker 06 What was more important, as far as they were concerned, was stimulating consumption. And so the food stamp program was designed to enable low-income households to buy more and ideally better food. Because if you have more income, you tend to buy better quality food.
20:31 Cynthia Graber? This was a big conceptual shift. Like we said, the real priority for food stamps 2.0 was ending hunger rather than reducing surpluses. But another aspect of the food stamp program stayed the same, at least at first. You had to buy the stamps.
20:46 Speaker 06 That was the part that was important. They thought that people had to have skin in the game, this idea that they had to buy stamps.
20:52 Cynthia Graber? The pilots were successful, though, of course, they were just pilots. They were small scale. And then Kennedy was assassinated.
20:57 Speaker 06 After Kennedy's death, Johnson had taken up the mantle of making sure that the program gets enacted into the Food Stamp Act of 1964.
21:06 Speaker 05 And this administration, today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.
21:17 Speaker 06 Which is the basis of today's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to this day.
21:22 Cynthia Graber? So even with that hiatus, during and just after World War II, food stamps are officially old now, many, many decades old. And like anything that's been around that long, they've gone through some struggles. One of the early problems that emerged was that buying stamps just wasn't feasible for the very poorest Americans. Many didn't have the cash upfront to buy the stamps to then get an extra bonus. And also, this new food stamp program replaced what the government had been doing, giving out occasional free commodities, surpluses. And so some of the people who had relied on those handouts and who couldn't afford food stamps were now actually hungry. Than before. In any case, it turned out that making people pay for the stamps made the program less effective.
22:03 Nicola Twilley? So Democrats kept trying to get that purchase requirement waived. Meanwhile, Republicans and some more conservative Southern Democrats didn't believe that people should get anything for free in America, at least not if they were poor.
22:17 Speaker 06 So they had this notion that if you're going to get any kind of support, you should work for it.
22:22 Nicola Twilley? This all led to lots of wheeling and dealing.
22:24 Speaker 06 And so the defenders of agriculture, the commodity program promoters would say, all right, I'll support your food stamps in return for you supporting cotton program, or I'll support more money for food stamps if you put in work requirements. So there's all this bargaining going on in Congress.
22:41 Cynthia Graber? The bargaining led to a pretty major change in the food stamp program in 1977 at the beginning of the Carter administration.
22:47 Speaker 06 When, in return, you know, if we're getting rid of the purchase requirement, this is one of the biggest changes, they get rid of the purchase requirement. In return, okay, there's going to be some more work requirements.
22:57 Nicola Twilley? Regardless of these attempts to constrain who could get it, the food stamp program kept expanding. Inflation in the 1970s had driven many more Americans into poverty, and inequality had started to expand dramatically as labor unions and progressive taxation were steadily diminished. By 1980, 1 in 10 Americans was getting food stamps, and the USDA was spending more on food stamps than it was on agricultural programs.
23:22 Cynthia Graber? And then Reagan was elected, and he was not a fan of helping out poor people. He had all sorts of super offensive rhetoric about welfare queens, this idea that people were living large off government assistance. It's not that there wasn't any fraud, but this really wasn't widespread at all.
23:37 Speaker 06 So early 80s, the Reagan administration slashes social welfare spending, you know, cuts the food stamp program, cuts other nutrition programs, cuts welfare. At the same time, you had the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.
23:50 Nicola Twilley? Meanwhile, once again, the problem of surpluses was hitting the headlines. In the 1977 farm bill, dairy farmers had been given particularly generous price supports with predictable results in terms of overproduction by the 80s.
24:05 Speaker 06 You have this massive amount of cheese. Cheese being purchased and stored in butter and dried milk, being purchased and stored by the government to keep dairy prices stable.
24:14 Cynthia Graber? That led to Reagan wanting to give it all away. The government shipped millions and millions of pounds of cheese and butter all around the country, and nobody had the storage or the systems to hand it out. It was a total mess. At one point, people on government assistance got an entire five-pound block of American cheddar, which became known as government cheese.
24:40 Nicola Twilley? This government cheese business was widely mocked. And to sort of rescue the whole thing, Congress ended up funding an entirely new program that would funnel dairy and other surpluses to states while also funneling money to a whole new kind of organization that could distribute that excess.
24:56 Speaker 06 And suddenly you had this organizational entity called a food bank that was going to be able to handle the commodity.
25:02 Cynthia Graber? These food banks were kind of new. They'd started to pop up in the late 70s and early 80s as a more organized way to try to feed people.
25:09 Speaker 06 So you have the surpluses back. It's just not in the same way. Suddenly, it's being diverted to the food bank sector.
25:16 Nicola Twilley? Which also raises the question, why do people need food banks when we already have food stamps? We're going to come back to that. But first of all, we told you that food stamps are actually no longer technically called food stamps. So how did that happen?
25:31 Cynthia Graber? When Clinton was president, there was yet another battle over food stamps. Republicans pushed again to limit who could receive food stamps and increase how much they'd have to be working. These changes did end up getting incorporated into law. But in that law was another change, the move from the physical world to the digital one.
25:47 Speaker 06 And one of the provisions in there, we would move to EBT, electronic benefit transfer cards, debit cards essentially, to get rid of stamps. So that's why it was relabeled SNAP in 2008, because there was no stamps anymore.
26:00 Nicola Twilley? Lots of people still call SNAP benefits food stamps because it is the same program, just with a debit card and no paper stamps. But that can ruffle some feathers.
26:09 Speaker 06 Some people call it food stamps because it evokes negative images. You know, those who usually defend SNAP called SNAP.
26:16 Cynthia Graber? But the change wasn't just a digital and a Semantic one, it did make a material difference in the experience of the people who are using it.
26:22 Speaker 06 Under the old days, and I know people who had food stamps in the old days, you had to stand in line with your coupons and your cash, and you had to sort of pay cash for some things, and you had to use coupons for the other. And people are behind you looking at, oh, she's buying steak with her food stamps, that kind of shaming dimension that goes on in lines. And some big supermarkets would have separate food stamp lines, especially at the beginning of the month, where they would have a different cashier for those with food stamps. So you can imagine how people felt about that.
26:52 Cynthia Graber? But with the new EBT card, you just go into the store and use it like a credit card.
26:56 Nicola Twilley? Another unanticipated benefit is that some non-food stamp shoppers, the kind of people who might resent the idea that they, as taxpayers, are the ones paying for their neighbors to buy steak, or shrimp, or whatever else they feel like is too ritzy for poor people to eat, they can no longer see that someone is paying using EBT. So that actually helps reduce one trigger that used to set people against food stamps.
27:21 Cynthia Graber? Another benefit of the EBT cards was that they reduced fraud. There's never been a huge amount of fraud in the system, despite what the haters may say, but there was some in the past, and there's less now. It's just harder to cheat.
27:31 Speaker 06 The biggest source of cheating oftentimes is retailers. Back in the old days, retailers would sort of do deals with customers, or they'd steal the stamps. EBT cards reduce fraud.
27:40 Nicola Twilley? Today, like we said, SNAP is America's longest-running food assistance program, so on the level of pure lasting power, it's definitely a success. But does it do what we want it to do? Does it actually reduce hunger and help Americans get out of poverty and eat a healthier diet? And could it do those things better? It's judgment time for SNAP after this quick word from our sponsors.
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30:02 Cynthia Graber? It's time to evaluate SNAP. And so one big question is, do we still need SNAP today? We're one of the richest countries in the world. But it turns out that about 1 in 7 Americans are food insecure, about 1/3 of those are kids. These are people who aren't sure they'll be able to buy enough groceries for their family each month. And SNAP does help.
30:18 Speaker 06 Yes, and that's unequivocal. I mean, there's every bit of evidence is that, if nothing else, SNAP reduces food insecurity. It enables households to buy more food. All the studies that we've seen indicate that.
30:31 Nicola Twilley? But that said, Chris says SNAP doesn't actually solve the problem of hunger and food insecurity in America. For a variety of reasons, it often isn't enough by itself.
30:41 Speaker 06 SNAP benefits often don't last through the whole month, especially with families with teenage kids, because SNAP benefits don't take into account the age of the children, they're just numbers of people in a household.
30:54 Nicola Twilley? And everyone who's not in the federal government is perfectly aware that teens eat slightly more than toddlers do.
31:00 Cynthia Graber? Also, SNAP benefits are based on something called a thrifty meal plan. It's the idea that you'll be cooking things like beans and bulk rice. It averages out at not much more than $3 per person per meal. So it really relies on home cooking and bulk shopping. It's not possible for everyone.
31:15 Speaker 06 So even with SNAP, roughly 50%, there's some estimates of 50% of SNAP households end up going to food pantries at the end of the month.
31:23 Nicola Twilley? Which is why we still have that whole food bank system Chris talked about, where the government funds food banks through what they originally, 40 something years ago, called the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program, but eventually gave up and just took off the temporary.
31:38 Cynthia Graber? So SNAP does reduce food insecurity, though it doesn't get rid of the problem of hunger entirely. But then, so how about nutrition and general well-being? Do people who use SNAP eat food that's overall better for them than poor people who don't have access to it? Chris says yes.
31:52 Speaker 06 The higher SNAP benefits, the more the people can afford better quality, fresher and more nutritious food. We know that. Economists have proven that time and again. If you have more income, you buy better quality food, better quality proteins, more fruits and vegetables.
32:07 Nicola Twilley? One wrinkle is that while receiving SNAP benefits tends to lead to a healthier diet overall, Chris told us it is super tricky to assess whether SNAP positively affects people's health. Because SNAP enrollees tend to be poor, they tend to have worse health to start off with because of a whole list of reasons. Poor people are typically more exposed to environmental toxins, they have less access to quality healthcare, they have more chronic stress, et cetera.
32:33 Cynthia Graber? SNAP can't deal with all that. The only thing SNAP can do is give people money for food. And as Chris keeps saying, that has been shown to help them buy more, better, and healthier food options.
32:43 Nicola Twilley? But that doesn't stop some politicians and activists from wanting to put restrictions on what SNAP users can buy to force them away from sugary sodas and Doritos and toward healthier options. There's a new effort to do that right now. The Trump administration has allowed states to put these kinds of restrictions in place for the first time.
33:02 Speaker 02 It is being called a major win for the Maha movement. More states removing junk food from SNAP programs. That's food stamps. Prioritizing real nutrition over processed snacks, sugary drinks. That brings the total to 12 states. So one dozen so far. All restricting SNAP purchases of unhealthy foods, beverages, under the new USDA waivers.
33:29 Cynthia Graber? Honestly, before we talked to Chris, that sounded kind of logical to us. But Chris said there's no data that these restrictions encourage people to choose healthier options.
33:37 Speaker 06 I've seen no evidence so far that restricting people on what they can use their SNAP benefits on will work. For one thing, I'll be blunt. If you want to buy your kids a 2-liter bottle of, say, Coca-Cola.
33:52 Nicola Twilley? Which is available at the low, low price of $3, thanks in part to the highly subsidized high fructose corn syrup that is its main ingredient. And $3 is not a huge amount, even for folks who qualify for SNAP.
34:04 Speaker 06 So if you can't use your SNAP dollars for it, you'll use other money for it. So I don't think it'll have the intended impacts.
34:11 Cynthia Graber? Also, it's kind of a bureaucratic nightmare. Who is the person who's going to decide what's healthy and what's not? Something might be called a granola bar, but it actually might be little better than a candy bar. Who makes that decision? The food companies? Basically, limiting SNAP benefits sounds good in theory, but is unlikely to make a difference.
34:28 Nicola Twilley? What does work is carrots, literally in the form of incentives to buy fresh fruit and vegetables.
34:34 Speaker 06 A lot of states have what we call healthy incentives programs, where if you get SNAP dollars, maybe the state will kick in another $10 a month that you can use at the local farmer's market to buy fresh produce. Those work. So do higher benefits. The point is, if you give people more money, however you do it, they use it again to buy better, more and better food.
34:57 Cynthia Graber? Okay. So then what about overall poverty? Does SNAP help produce it?
35:00 Speaker 06 Yes, actually. The studies I've seen say that SNAP, if nothing else, reduces poverty because, again, it's an income supplement. We target it toward food, but at the end of the day, it's an income supplement. And the money of my own that I'm not having to spend on food, I can use for other purposes.
35:15 Nicola Twilley? Researchers have found that SNAP is particularly good at reducing extreme poverty and also poverty in families with children. And kids in households that receive SNAP benefits are likelier to graduate high school, have better health, and become economically self-sufficient than kids in low-income households that qualify for but are not enrolled in SNAP. Making SNAP available to newly released prisoners even reduces their rate of reoffending.
35:41 Cynthia Graber? It's also more effective as an anti-poverty program than a lot of our other anti-poverty programs, like, say, the child tax credit, because you don't have to be a parent, or disabled, or a veteran, or whatever. You just have to need it. And it doesn't disappear once you go over a certain threshold like others do. It's graduated. You just get less of it when you don't need as much.
36:01 Speaker 06 If you make more money, you get fewer SNAP benefits, but you don't get cut off at the knees automatically.
36:07 Cynthia Graber? And also, moving people out of poverty, as SNAP does, it helps everyone. It turns out that each dollar of SNAP is money that's spent locally and generates even more economic activity.
36:16 Nicola Twilley? Throughout SNAP's history, conservatives have worried that even if SNAP reduces poverty and hunger, it's still kind of morally questionable because it incentivizes people not to work so as not to lose their free food. This is Reagan's whole welfare queen shtick. And as we told you, there are work requirements built into SNAP as a result. But Chris says that's actually counterproductive.
36:40 Speaker 06 A lot of those folks have other things going on. Mental illness, addiction. They have educational deficiencies. They have other kinds of deficiencies. And so it's not quite clear that these people have an easy time holding a job, period. Now, again, there's a fair percentage of SNAP households where people already were working, so it's not going to incentivize those folks anymore because they're already working. They just don't make enough money.
37:04 Cynthia Graber? But that hasn't stopped the people who want to make sure anyone who's getting assistance is working hard for it. The Trump administration's most recent bill made work requirements even more strict, and so frankly, more people are going to go hungry.
37:15 Speaker 05 Forty-two million Americans participate in SNAP, but Rollins says 800,000 have moved off food stamps in part because of the administration's expansion of work requirements.
37:25 Nicola Twilley? That could sound like a saving, but Chris says in reality, it just means pain. Not just in terms of more hungry people, but also they're a pain for the states to implement.
37:35 Speaker 06 A lot of states would rather not do them. They require a lot of bureaucracy, and so frankly, a lot of states would rather not be burdened by doing work requirements because there's no evidence, or very little evidence, that they actually incentivize work. But they are a pain to administer.
37:51 Nicola Twilley? The point here is not that states are lazy and don't want to do this. It's that the bureaucracy of making sure SNAP recipients are fulfilling their work requirements costs money, often as much if not more money as the state might save by kicking people off SNAP who are not fulfilling the requirements.
38:09 Cynthia Graber? And all those people being moved off SNAP, it's not like they suddenly can afford all the food they need. They're totally fine. They're not. And the food bank system does not have enough food or infrastructure to take the place of SNAP. So frankly, more people are going to go hungry.
38:22 Nicola Twilley? These initiatives aside, Chris says in general, SNAP is still doing what it's supposed to do: reducing hunger while boosting nutrition, and also reducing poverty while not encouraging people to laze around. But it's not the only tool that exists to achieve those goals, so would other things work better?
38:42 Speaker 05 The president wants to put government-issued food in boxes and have it delivered to the people directly. Now, they compare it to Blue Apron, that...
38:53 Speaker 05 That food delivery service for young professionals, young millennials, it ain't that. This is prepackaged food. It is canned meat. It is shelf-stable milk. It is that kind of stuff that then would be delivered.
39:08 Cynthia Graber? In a move that sounded suspiciously like the original boxes of 30 pounds of citrus or four pounds of prunes, Trump officials, in his first time in office, suggested that instead of SNAP, people in need would be sent a so-called "harvest" box. We've already seen why this doesn't work.
39:21 Speaker 06 It was widely ridiculed among everybody, as impractical, convoluted, and robbed people of choice.
39:28 Nicola Twilley? Retailers also hated the box concept because, just like before in the days of four pounds of prunes, it would have bypassed them. And one thing to know about SNAP is it is actually a huge benefit to retailers and the food industry in general. Big food companies like Kraft and PepsiCo and retailers like Walmart and Target, they benefit from and process tens of billions of dollars' worth of SNAP money every year, which is a decent chunk of their annual revenue.
39:54 Cynthia Graber? What's interesting about a lot of these major companies is that they don't just benefit from processing SNAP. Also, they pay such a low wage, minimum wage, and they lobby for a low minimum wage, that a lot of their workers are on SNAP assistance. In fact, Walmart and McDonald's are among the top companies in terms of workers who rely on SNAP. We are subsidizing that for them.
40:15 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, the critique is, of course, that it enables retailers in particular, people in the food system in particular, to have low wages. One of the charges levied is that SNAP is a big subsidy for Walmart, for example. The entire food system is dependent, in many respects, on cheap labor. And cheap labor can only happen, you know, in many respects if you provide SNAP or other supports. Sort of perverse in that sense.
40:40 Nicola Twilley? So if we're looking at other options instead of SNAP, it seems like we could definitely spend a lot less on SNAP as a nation if we raised the minimum wage to a living wage. Would that work? Chris says, yes, but.
40:55 Speaker 06 So everybody says, well, higher minimum wages will be to higher prices. That's probably true. Again, we're subsidizing low prices already through the tax system and through the welfare system. I mean, in some respects, we already are paying the price, just differently. So, you know, if we were paying a higher price for foods, the argument goes, because of higher cost of labor, it'd be a more honest way of actually how we approach food.
41:21 Nicola Twilley? Neither Chris nor I are optimistic enough to think that we're going to achieve that kind of honesty in our relationship with food in America anytime soon, sadly. So, yeah, we can dream and also vote for politicians who support a higher minimum wage.
41:36 Cynthia Graber? But food costs wouldn't necessarily soar with a higher minimum wage. These companies like Walmart that pay their workers so little that the workers need federal assistance, they often have executives that make kind of insane amounts of money. They could just pay some of that to their workers as salary and they'd barely notice. Also, we could afford to help out people who can't work with programs like SNAP if those companies and their owners paid their fair share of taxes.
42:00 Speaker 06 Well, OK, I'll go there. That, you know, again, I mean, if we just revoked all the tax cuts given under the last three Republican presidents, we wouldn't have this discussion. And renewed last year, a trillion dollar tax cut for billionaires on the backs of poor people. It's not very scholarly of me, but as a citizen, I think it's unconscionable. I mean, we could easily pay for this, but it would force us to actually confront the fact that we're just giving away massive amounts of money to rich people who don't really have anything to do with it. It's not like they're going to buy more food. How many yachts can Bezos have?
42:34 Nicola Twilley? While we're heading out to the barricades here, let's just go all the way and ask, why not just give poor people cash rather than an EBT card they can only use on food?
42:44 Cynthia Graber? That famously liberal president, Richard Nixon, even thought this was a great idea back in the 1970s.
42:49 Speaker 06 It was actually a fair number of moderate Republicans and others in the early 70s who thought, wait a minute, why don't we redo the tax system so that people are given a guaranteed minimum income through the tax system? Instead of this sort of the convoluted system of welfare, let's simplify things and use the tax system in a way that people are guaranteed a minimum income. And there was a serious effort behind this, but it got derailed for a lot of reasons.
43:19 Cynthia Graber? We've pointed this out before, but the primary reason is that we, not us personally, but we as a country, we don't have a lot of faith that poor people can make good decisions.
43:28 Speaker 06 We don't trust poor people to spend their money wisely. So we, you know, we make everything, again, a voucher or tax credit.
43:36 Nicola Twilley? This is not very smart of us because every single study that has been done on cash assistance, or what is often called UBI, or universal basic income these days, every single study has found that it is the single most efficient and effective way to help poor people.
43:51 Cynthia Graber? And in fact, no other country does what we do, this weird food assistance thing, rather than cash. Other countries that have welfare programs do cash assistance for poor people. It might be tax credits, but it's still money. Not like you have to use this to buy food. And poverty rates and inequality are lower there.
44:07 Nicola Twilley? So theoretically, we should replace SNAP with cash.
44:11 Speaker 06 Well, economists would think so. I mean, cash is the easiest thing to do at all. But that's going to be highly unlikely for a while. I don't see us anytime soon in this country expanding cash assistance. I just don't see it ideologically or politically happening.
44:28 Cynthia Graber? It's this odd compromise we've had to make in America. Giving people cash in the form of food benefits means that fewer people are against it.
44:35 Speaker 06 In a country where people are famously against welfare, at least in the abstract sense, they also don't want to see their fellow Americans go hungry. In fact, when you quiz people, when there's public opinion polls, and you ask people, well, what do you think about welfare in some abstract sense? Everybody's against it. But if you ask them about more support for specific kinds of programs, like, you know, nutrition support, people are for it. So people programmatically are supporting SNAP because it's about food.
45:02 Nicola Twilley? This weird logic, where a weakness of SNAP, that it's less efficient than cash, is actually a strength because
45:09 Cynthia Graber? It means more people support it? That's one of the main insights of Chris's new book, Why Snap Works. Snap works because it doesn't 100% make sense. Another big strength of SNAP is another thing that really made no sense to either of us until we read this book. SNAP is part of the farm bill, and it comes under the authority of the Department of Agriculture. Other than SNAP, the farm bill is mostly subsidies for corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, dairy, and sugar, with some crop insurance, conservation programs, loans, and research in there, too. Helping hungry people and helping farmers, those two things were connected in the original food stamp program, but they haven't been for decades. So it seems weird to keep SNAP in the farm bill, but Chris says this is why it's still around. It comes down to political horse trading.
45:54 Cynthia Graber? The farmers need SNAP because it gives politicians from states with big commodity farms something to negotiate over to make sure politicians who don't have commodity farmers among their constituents still support all the subsidies and so on.
46:06 Speaker 06 Those who are promoting agricultural programs are a smaller and smaller group. So they recognize that they have a sort of, it's a bit of hostage-taking. They're going to leverage support for food stamps in return for liberals' support for commodity programs.
46:21 Cynthia Graber? Though we should point out that there are a lot of SNAP recipients in rural areas as well, so politicians in those more rural states should also support SNAP. But in any case, if you separated out SNAP from the farm bill, the farmers would lose.
46:34 Speaker 06 Nice commodity program you have there, too bad about it. Why would I vote for that? Why would I support something that's essentially welfare for affluent farmers? That's the way it'll be seen. So if I'm the ag sector, folks, I'd be very careful about what I wish for because this can come back to haunt you.
46:51 Cynthia Graber? But also, if you separated out SNAP from the farm bill, SNAP would lose. Chris says that even though it's a tiny chunk of the federal budget, way, way less than what we spend on, for example, defense, or servicing the national debt, or for that matter, social security, it would be vulnerable out there on its own.
47:09 Speaker 06 It'd be too easy to sort of go at it as welfare. Whereas if it's sort of shielded within the farm bill to some extent, it becomes, you can bargain. And so call me a bit skeptical about calls to move SNAP out of the USDA and out of the Agricultural Act, because, and I've said this to people who are nutrition folks who think it'd be better off on its own, I say, not in terms of the real politics. I think in real politics terms, you want all the friends you can get.
47:37 Cynthia Graber? So basically, even with all its challenges, Chris says that SNAP works. It's kind of the best we can do with our current political situation. Chris says what would make SNAP better would be to just make it easier to qualify for it.
47:49 Speaker 06 From my perspective, you want to enable everybody who is eligible, technically eligible because of income, to get their benefits. But we throw up a lot of hurdles. I think that under the recently enacted one big beautiful bill act, they made it harder. We're going to force states to actually pay more in administrative costs. We're going to force states to pay a portion of the benefits for the first time in history. These are all bad things. From my perspective, SNAP works, so I think you want to make it as easy as possible for those who are eligible to apply for their benefits and get their benefits. Period. End of discussion.
48:27 Cynthia Graber? Thanks this episode to Chris Bosso. His new book is called Why SNAP Works, and we have a link to it on our website, gastropod.com. Thanks also to our fantastic producer, Claudia Guy. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.
48:41 Speaker 06 Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.
49:03 Speaker 07 We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.
49:27 Speaker 06 This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.
49:40 Speaker 04 This series is presented by EY. We're in the AI era, where agents access data, use tools, make decisions, and automate work across the enterprise. It's tremendous innovation, but it's also an incredible cybersecurity challenge, one that CrowdStrike helps solve. CrowdStrike AI Detection and Response helps organizations detect, investigate, and respond to threats targeting and originating from AI systems, so companies can innovate faster while securing the AI era. Learn more at crowdstrike.com/vox. CrowdStrike: We Secure AI. We Stop Breaches.
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