The Food Stamp Program

Chapter 8 describes and evaluates the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (food stamps). It demonstrates its serious shortcomings and interprets the program as an expression of mass values. The food stamp program in the United States remains as it always was: convoluted, inadequate, and frequently unfair, even after more than half a century of priority concern from a number of presidents, as well as congressional attention recorded in thousands of pages of panels, investigations, hearings, and reports. For all its wealth, it is not clear that the United States has ensured access for its citizens to “a nutritionally adequate low-cost diet.” Yet its design embodies the assumptions of policy romanticism unreasonably insisting on self-reliance.

Food Stamps and Public Welfare

Chapter 9 describes the food stamp program as inseparable from the romantic certainties that gave rise to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). It focuses on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The characteristics of food stamp recipients and welfare recipients generally and the performance of welfare programs—objective social need and response—are less germane to the American people than their beliefs in virtue. Those beliefs are sustained by faith in an imagined tradition more than by social reality or even the effects that those beliefs have on the conditions of need. Food stamp benefits, taken together with all means-tested welfare programs, are inadequate to routinely raise recipients out of poverty. Serious deprivation remains widespread. Rather than relieve poverty, these public welfare programs ceremonialize the tenets of policy romanticism.