In Young Frankenstein, Gene Wilder, having just hoisted a body from a grave says “What a filthy job.” Marty Feldman replies, “Could be worse,” to which Wilder asks, “How?” Feldman notes, “Could be raining.” And, of course, it then starts to rain.

Well, here in Missouri it’s raining on those who ought to get food stamps.

The state Department of Social Services is not issuing the 160+ page Monthly Management Reports for the Family Support Division and Medical Services due to issues with the MO HealthNet/Medicaid program. Folks in DSS research are sharing the SNAP numbers with me.

They are not pretty: From July 2013 to July 2014 a total of 89,768 people have left the food stamp rolls – a drop of 9.8 percent in one year.

That would be good news if Missouri had a booming economy with tens of thousands of new, middle class jobs being created each year. As we all know, we don’t.

Across the nation food stamp state totals have been trending down around 3 to 4 percent a year. I am convinced that Missouri’s “extra 5 percent” in recipient drop is due to the fumbled implementation of the reorganization of the Family Support Division. I have talked to pantry folk who routinely hear from families who have waited two and three months for a routine reauthorization of the food stamp account. Many pantry customers talk of lost documents, the inability to talk to a person who knows their case when they call, and, general confusion in the system.

The major changes in the way food stamp cases are handled began last summer here in the St. Louis area. The decline in the participant total from July 2012 to July 2013 was 20,053 people – 2 percent of the caseload. If we had the same decline percentage from 2013 to 2014 we would have 70,000 more Missourians receiving food stamps, adding $8.4 million a month to the state’s economy.

In July 2014 the average benefit was $120.18 per person–$1.29 per person per meal. Statewide, $99,628,234 in benefits were issued.

Of course, people who ought to get food stamps but don’t receive them are not starving to death in the streets. They are filling food pantry lobbies and building nutritional debts which their bodies will pay later.

Food stamps in Ferguson

The state folks also shared the total number of food stamp recipients in a number of north St. Louis County Zip Codes. While post office boundaries don’t directly follow city limits, the food stamp numbers were extremely interesting:63135 (downtown Ferguson and some surrounding smaller municipalities): 2,413 recipients

• 63136 (the W. Florissant apartment area of Ferguson & Jennings): 8,035 recipients
• 63135 (downtown Ferguson and some surrounding smaller municipalities): 2,413 recipient
• For comparison, 63130 (most of University City): 2,041 recipients.

Remember that Missouri has better than a handful of northern counties with fewer than 8,000 residents: the concentration of struggling families in one zip code is scary.

The 2009 conundrum

The other month I shared data from the Food Research and Action Center, which, using numbers from USDA, showed that Missouri was the only state in the nation to show a decline in food stamp recipients from 2009 to 2014.

People in certain buildings in Jefferson City were not amused.

The Department of Social Services admitted in late 2009 that Missouri overcounted the number of food stamp recipients. Basically, the different computer systems didn’t listen to each other. While new people were added to the rolls, those within families who should have been removed (moved out of the home, etc.) weren’t. The problem apparently went on for several – perhaps seven – years.

For example, in April 2009 Missouri claimed it had 1,041,077 food stamp recipients, and that is the number FRAC cited this summer. Now the state says the correct total for April 2009 was around 800,000 recipients. They note that USDA has changed some (but not all) published numbers from Missouri for 2009 and the “whoops” era.

The problem appears to have been fixed by the end of 2009: the January 2010 food stamp total was 894,418 people compared to 1,119,067 in September 2009 despite the rapid increase in folks getting help due to the recession.
Now we need to back-up a step. The data FRAC used is from USDA reports on what the federal government paid Missouri for the food stamps issued. In other words, even if the correct number was 800,000 Washington gave Missouri money for a million people. The families getting the bonus money had no way of knowing they were getting too generous benefits. (A more important yet unanswered question is did Missouri ever pay that money back?)

So, what number should be used?

Despite the state’s protestations, evidence shows that Missouri issued benefits to 1,041,077 people in April 2009. If the benefits were issued – even in error – they went to families and the stamps went through cash registers all about the state.

My files from back then show the average benefit was $1.09 per person per meal. (By the way, April 2009 is when benefits soared due to the recovery act’s bonus payments. In March 2009 the average benefit was 93 cents per person per meal.)

In other words, the overpayments probably didn’t allow families to buy steak and lobster. They just made their lives a bit easier. I can live with that.

A quick swipe at Fox News

The GAO recently issued a report on errors in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The headline: Payment Errors and Trafficking Have Declined, but Challenges Remain. The report put the fraud rate at 1 percent of benefits issued and included a chart documenting dramatic improvements since 1999 in case accuracy.

Fox News, of course, headlined their story “Food Stamp Fraud Rampant: GAO Report.”.

I expect their lead story tomorrow to be, “Despite Obama, the Sun Rose This Morning.”

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In the national response to the Zimmerman trial, at rallies across the country, we hear from the bullhorns the outrage over police profiling minorities in traffic stops, the injustice displayed in our criminal courts and the fear of parents for the safety of their black and Hispanic children.  There have been calls, even from President Obama, for a national discussion of race relations in the United States.

Here in St. Louis, a scandal over dried-out asparagus may offer another symbol of racial inequality.

Recently, a member of the University City Human Rights Commission questioned whether the dried-out asparagus in the produce section of a local supermarket had any relationship to the store’s location in a black neighborhood. The accusation  resulted in a flurry of denials, articles and commentary in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a talk-radio discussion, letters to the editor, and a call Sunday, July 21, 2013 from the Post-Dispatch editor Gilbert Bailon to “please keep some perspective,” that “asparagus rights do not hold cosmic life lessons.”

What lessons can we learn from what is now termed “the asparagus scandal”?

Whether the dried produce at the supermarket in question was only the result of a tray of water that had tipped over or not, the fact remains that the availability and quality of produce, meat and groceries in minority neighborhoods does not resemble that of our more affluent communities. The radio talk-show host [John Carney] said that this issue “got me thinking about the vast difference in produce” between a supermarket in an affluent suburb and another in the City of St. Louis.  A panel member on the radio show remarked that, though some of her colleagues called the asparagus story “silly,” there is a real issue of unequal maintenance of stores depending on where they are located.

Going to the only grocery store convenient to your home and finding a lack of quality produce or meat might not be as “cosmic” as being stopped and having your car searched, or receiving a jail sentence inappropriate to the crime, but it is important nonetheless. Knowing that when you go to a store, you’re getting lower quality food than shoppers in more affluent neighborhoods can make you feel undervalued, unequal, and lesser as a human being.

So, are we making a mountain out of a mole hill with the asparagus story?  The mountain might not be there, but the molehill still exists.  And as moles continue to burrow, they make more hills.  We need to be mindful of the damage that moles cause and make every effort to flatten these hills and create a level playing field for us all.

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The public health crisis in the United States is typically illustrated with alarming obesity rates and images of super-sized fast food portions. However 50 million Americans, or one in four of the nation’s children, are food insecure, meaning that they do not always have access to healthy foods to sustain them throughout the day. The nation is caught in the crosshairs of obesity and food insecurity, and somehow we have managed to have both too much and too little food at the same time.

As Magnolia Pictures’ A Place at the Table points out, hunger in America is not actually caused by a food shortage. When most people think of hunger they think of utter starvation without realizing that the obesity problem that plagues their nation is another, albeit, different sign of hunger. In the United States, the problem is not that the next meal never comes, but that the meal is often full of a lot of empty calories. Thus food insecurity and obesity are linked because nutritionally weak and high-caloric foods, such as French fries or potato chips, offer the most caloric bang for the buck.

Undoubtedly, children are hit hardest by the plague of food insecurity in the United States. Nutrition deprivation for children under the age of three are at risk for limiting their physical and mental potential as undernutrition in these children can lead to reduced cognition and increased susceptibility to infectious diseases. And regardless of greater school funding and pressure on teachers to improve students’ performance, a hungry child may struggle to focus and succeed in their classes regardless of change in education policy. A nation is only as strong as its youth and hunger is ultimately weakening this nation.

Despite its relative lack of attention, hunger is not a new issue in America. A 1968 CBS documentary, Hunger in America, highlighted the fact that hunger is a basic human need and should also be a human right. The documentary inspired Americans to demand action. Policy makers listened and passed legislation to expand the Food Stamp program, an elderly feeding program, and a the school breakfast program. Regular Americans rose to the challenge and demanded a solution and hunger was greatly eradicated by the end of the 1970s.

However, that success was short-lived. A Place at the Table explains that The 1980s and 90s brought a different public sentiment regarding food insecurity and the  issue of hunger in America shifted from being a public problem to a private problem as we began to rely on charities and churches to provide for the hungry. But charity food banks are not sustainable enough for long-term assistance, as they are intended to provide emergency support rather than chronic usage. People should not be forced to rely on these food banks for their day-to-day needs as charities cannot eradicate systemic hunger as they struggle to provide foods of significant nutritional value.

A Place at the Table also discusses how the price of produce has gone up since the 1980s while processed foods have remained cheap largely due to the agricultural subsidies that go to corn and wheat and largely ignore fruits, vegetables, and meat. These subsidies, which totaled $26 billion in 2000, are outdated as they date back to the Great Depression. FDR passed the Agriculture Adjustment Act in 1933 to provide emergency relief for families who risked losing their farms by purchasing their excess grain. But now the farming industry in America has changed, and consolidated and profitable corporations now dominate the agricultural landscape and have much less need for financial assistance. As the purpose of the current subsidy is no longer relevant, the film implies that America should consider making nutritious foods more affordable rather than focusing on corn and wheat production.

We need to tell our senators and representatives that if they are not with us on hunger, then we will not be with them for reelection. The problems in America are often unsolved due to political inaction and the bickering between blue and red ideology. But unlike many of the current hotly debated issues in congress, keeping our children properly fed is a bipartisan issue. Unfortunately food insecurity does not get the same level of media coverage as the nation’s more contentious issues. But as we have learned from the anti-hunger campaigns in the 1970s, the public can rise up, influence legislators, and ultimately alleviate or eliminate food insecurity in America. Now is the time to act.

Fir more information on how to fight food insecurity, text  the word “food” to 77177 or visit A Place at the Table’s action center at http://actioncenter.takepart.com/apatt.

Image credit: http://candychang.com/food-insecurity-poster/

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For the price of a few cans of food, I received a free ticket to a preview showing of A Place At the Table, a documentary examining the issue of food insecurity in the United States.  The movie was beautifully filmed; the musical score original. The facts were stark:

• 50 million (1 in 6) Americans suffer from food insecurity.  Food insecurity is defined as being uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of the members in their household.
• 17 million (1 in 4) children is food insecure.
• 85% of the food insecure families have at least one working adult in the household.
• 44 million Americans are on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP- formerly food stamps). One of every 2 kids will be on assistance at some point in their life.
• The average food stamp benefit is under $5 a day and a family of 4 cannot have an income that exceeds $29,000 a year to quality.
• 50 million Americans rely on charitable food programs to meet some of their food needs. There are over 40,000 food banks, soup kitchen and pantries in the U.S. up from 200 in 1980.
• While we subsidize agriculture that provides the ingredients for processed foods, we do not subsidize fruits, vegetable and whole grains. The price of fresh fruits and vegetables has gone up by 40% since 1980 while the price of processed foods has gone down by 40%.
• The National School lunch program reimburses schools $2.68 for a meal. After taking out costs for labor, administration, gas, electricity, custodial services, schools report they have between $.90 and $1 to spend on food.  (When $.06 was added to the reimbursement in 2012 those funds were removed from the food stamp program.)
• Only 25% of 19-24 year olds are found fit for military service. One of the principal reasons is that too many of our young people are overweight.
• It is estimated that the cost of hunger and food insecurity to the U.S. economy is $167 billion per year.

But as in the health care reform debate, the facts don’t give the heart (I was going to say “meat”) of the story. It is the personal accounts that resonate.

Rosie, a smiling, cheerful 5^th grader in rural Colorado says, “Sometimes we run out of food so we try to figure out something, probably ask friends for food.  We get really hungry and our tummies just growl and sometimes I feel like I’m going to barf cause it feels bad. I don’t really know what to do.”   (page 5 of linked document).

Rosie’s teacher says that Rosie, and others in her class, have difficulty concentrating because they are hungry. The teacher begins taking food bags weekly to some of the families in the school. The bags include high calorie snacks and canned meals that have little nutrition. She says that is better than nothing.

Barbie, a mother of two young children, lives in the inner city of Philadelphia. She is part of the Witness of Hunger Program and is an articulate advocate for the TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) emergency fund and for the earned income tax credit. “…Just because we live where we live and come from where we come from doesn’t mean that we’re not smart. Doesn’t mean that we don’t have potential. Doesn’t mean that we do not want education. Doesn’t mean that we want to depend on welfare for the rest of our lives.”  (page 19 of linked document)

Barbie who was on food stamps, secured a job. Three months later she is deemed to have too much income to qualify for food aid.  When that happens she reluctantly feeds her children inexpensive, high calorie foods so they won’t be hungry.

Tremonica, a 2^nd grader in Mississippi suffers from asthma and obesity and eats processed foods her mother buys.  Her teacher begins a program to introduce the children to fresh fruits and vegetables. But can her mother afford to buy a honey dew melon?

First lady Michelle Obama is shown calling for “quality, affordable food” for all our children, just as we health care advocates call for quality, affordable health care for all here in Missouri. We emphasize that a healthy child will do better in school and that a healthy adult will be a productive member of society. And a well fed child will have a better chance to succeed in school and a well fed adult is more likely to be a productive worker.

As in the health care debate, most of the adults with food insufficiency are hard working low income members of society. They do not want to be “takers”, they want to be “givers”.  The film demonstrated that taking food from pantries was humiliating and degrading for many.

Some of our politicians have encouraged charity as the answer to our health care and our hunger problems. In the health industry, “free” emergency room care is not the answer to lack of health insurance.  For those without enough to eat, food pantries won’t solve our problems.

We do not have a food shortage. We have a have broken food system, like we have a broken health care system.  As an advocate from Paraquad said during the Medicaid expansion kick off campaign, “The safety net is not safe; the safety net has holes.”

One in 3 children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. Just think of those health care costs in the future.  It is good economics to fix the problem and see that everyone has adequate, nutritious food.  It is also the morally correct thing to do; everyone in the United States deserves enough to eat.

When advocating for Medicaid expansion in Missouri we agree with Governor Nixon that it is the smart thing to do for our economy and it is the right thing to do to help our uninsured.

It is time we do the smart and the right thing and fix both our food and health delivery systems.

A Place at the Table will be released nationally March 1, 2013.   A full description and information about the movie can be accessed here.

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“Nearly one in four people in St. Louis, Mo., lives in poverty — a rate twice the national average. In a state that’s 67 percent farmland, 271,000 households face food insecurity each year. Complicating matters is the ongoing recession, which has forced many of the newly unemployed and the working poor into food pantries and onto food stamps.”

That’s the dire description that opens an article, authored by Julia Ramey Serazio, and  published in the Summer 2010 issue of Next American City. In the article, three St. Louis-based hunger fighters share their views on the changing social and economic nature of hunger in America.

The interviewees are: Frank Finnegan, executive director of the St. Louis Area Food Bank; Annie Mayrose, head of Gateway Greening’s City Seeds Urban Farm program; and Mark Rank, professor of social welfare at Washington University, whose research focuses on poverty and social injustice nationwide. [This post is reprinted, with modifications for space, from the original article.]

How would you describe the general landscape of hunger right now?

Finnegan: When the food bank first opened in the mid-1970s, it was more of an emergency program. There was a high number of low-birthweight babies, so we focused on what might help pregnant women. Most of the people we served were the short-term unemployed, the recently unemployed, or people who had a tragedy that caused them to leave the workforce and needed help for a few months until they went back. Now we find a much more permanent underclass that is almost always in need… More and more, we’re providing food to the working poor, and because of the high unemployment rate, now we’re finding the newly unemployed.

Mayrose: It’s very similar here, I think, to a lot of cities that have had urban sprawl where population exoduses left these giant food deserts… In St. Louis, we lost more than 500,000 people in those years alone, and now we have 350,000 people in the city with these mass gaps where there might not be a grocery store for miles. Corner stores don’t offer nutritious foods…

Rank: What you find is that people in poverty often have to make very hard choices between necessities. A classic trade-off is the “heat or eat” dilemma — in winter you have to decide whether you’re going to pay for heat or get food. A USDA report came out recently looking at the issue of food insecurity, which is a broader term for hunger. They found that among households below the poverty line, 42 percent also experience food insecurity. For households with kids, 50 percent experienced food insecurity in 2008. What people wind up doing is buying food that fills them up but is not nutritious, because it’s cheaper.

What are the greatest misconceptions about hunger?

Finnegan: The greatest misconception is, “I don’t know anybody who’s hungry.” People read about it, but they don’t think it’s happening in their neighborhood. You’re not going to find people who are starving to death. You are going to find people who are malnourished. They aren’t eating fruits and vegetables because they can’t afford to. I lived on food stamps for a week to learn about it. I had roughly $27. You can’t afford fresh fruits, so you go one of two ways: You eat what is filling and convenient, like crackers, chips and McDonald’s. The thing I did was bulk up, so I made ham and beans in a Crock-Pot, and that’s what you eat for four days in a row. In our area, only about 1 percent of people are homeless. It’s not the people on the street. It’s people living in houses, in urban and rural areas. It’s not an inner-city problem. …

Mayrose: I think the biggest misconception is that we can’t produce enough food. It’s not that — it’s the methods of distribution… It’s affordability, access, education and the types of equipment that we use. There are three growing seasons in St. Louis, so that’s a lot of food in a small space. People don’t realize how powerful urban agriculture can be with the right processes.

Rank: Some people say there isn’t a hunger problem because they see people who are overweight in poverty. A lot of that has to do with this issue of not getting the right nutrition. I did a study that found half of all American children will at some point be in a household that uses food stamps. The conception is, “The group that uses welfare and food stamps is a small group; it’s minorities; it’s not something I need to pay attention to.” If you look across the ages of 20 to 75, three-quarters of Americans will experience a year of poverty. This is an event that affects the vast majority of us. Things happen to people that they didn’t anticipate, like this recession. When these things happen, there’s not a whole lot in place to protect people. There are a couple reasons for this: One is that our country has always been based on an individualistic ethos. We’ve always had this feeling that the individual is responsible and the government is a last resort. This has worked against the idea that social welfare programs can be very helpful; there has been a tremendous amount of stigma around them. Nobody is proud to say, “Hey, I’m in poverty and I need help.” Another big reason the U.S. does so little is because our country is very heterogeneous in terms of race and ethnicity. The more homogenous a nation, the more likely it is to provide social safety nets. Poverty gets overlapped with this issue of race — people say this is a black or a Hispanic issue — it’s your problem and not our problem. As a result, we’re a reluctant welfare state.

Frank, how has the food supply changed for your organization?

Finnegan: Food banks follow the trends in the food industry…The majority of our product comes from the food industry. Kellogg, Quaker, Kraft and others donate their overproductions, their mistakes and new things that aren’t selling. When I started, we got a lot of overproduction. There’d be a truckload of Cap’n Crunch, which they’d rather donate than let go stale. Now when you go to the store, you buy something and it’s scanned, and that info is then shared with the manufacturer, so now they produce to replace. Now what we get is damaged product, or stuff left over after changes in packaging styles. As overproduction started to go away, food banks adapted. One of the things we’re bringing in now is fresh produce. We transport potatoes, onions, carrots and bananas. Kellogg can determine how many boxes of Cap’n Crunch they’ll have, but apple orchards can’t. We’re also doing a lot more store pickups now. We have trucks that go to Sam’s Club or Walmart and pick up that product that they would pull before it’s spoiled, but when it has hit a sell-by date.

When considering federal policy toward hunger, what sorts of things are you lobbying for? Are there any policies that you would like to see implemented or changed?

Finnegan: I was just in Washington, lobbying. We were up there working on job reauthorization, and the reauthorization of programs that feed children, including summer food services. The federal government could do much better, but they do provide us with product through emergency food assistance. I think the state government also has a responsibility to help those residents in need of additional food…

Mayrose: The WIC program as a whole in Missouri provides only $10 a month for fruits and vegetables. And they just increased it from $8. So it’s about improving programs like that to make them more efficient and effective. We’re also working with social service providers to convey to people there are farmers markets around, and they can use their benefits at some of these locations.

Rank: …The one thing we have that’s had a positive effect on poverty has been Social Security. In the 1950s 30 percent of the elderly were poor. Now just 10 percent are, and the only reason is Social Security. What has happened is the reverse for families and children, so when things happen to people, like you lose a job or get sick, there’s not a lot in place to protect you. You need to protect people from falling into poverty. If you can prevent it, especially for kids, you can save a lot of money in the long run…

Mark, you’ve done a lot of work studying the food stamp program. How well is it working?

Rank: When you look back at the history of food stamps, what a lot of people said is, “We want to make sure we identify people using this in the grocery line. We want them to feel bad, so that they are stigmatized and they don’t feel comfortable.” But now they’ve made it more accessible and less stigmatized. So instead of a stamp, people have a debit card. Nobody knows if you’re using a credit card or a food stamp card. They’ve changed the name to SNAP to make it sound more like a nutrition program than a welfare program. There’s more effort to convince people that if you qualify, you really should consider getting it. In this case there’s been a change of heart, and this is important from a nutritional point of view. It does no good to have people go hungry, especially children. But it still comes out that the amount people get is not enough. People routinely run out after the third week, and only about 65 percent of people who qualify for the program actually receive assistance.

What can be done on a community level to fight hunger?

Mayrose: The neighborhood aspect is the backbone of our organization. ..City Seeds is a 2.5-acre organic garden in downtown St. Louis. We partner with St. Patrick’s Center, which provides services for the homeless. We provide day-to-day supervision. Clients who work on the farm have to be duly enrolled in all the other supportive services the center offers, to treat drugs, alcohol, mental illness, etc. We have a therapeutic horticulture track and a job skills training class for folks a little more stable, who are ready to get an entry-level job… The farm is a great place to break down misconceptions of hunger and food injustice.

Rank: One thing would be having cities being able to provide affordable, quality childcare, which also provides some kind of nutrition. School nutrition programs are important. Communities can invest in those kinds of things…

Urban agriculture is gaining traction nationwide. How can it overlap with other approaches to fighting hunger?

Finnegan: Urban agriculture is a little too small-scale for what we do. But we do encourage our agencies to get involved with it. If somebody local wants to garden, we’ll pair them up with an agency in their neighborhood, and then the food bypasses us. We’re also looking at trying to partner with local growers here who have a market for their products but don’t bring them all to market. Like misshapen cucumbers — those they plough right back in. I don’t care if the cucumber is misshapen if it’s going to keep me from paying to ship it from across the country. And I can pay a local farmer. It’s a smaller footprint and a lower price. I didn’t realize that of the product he grows, maybe 20 percent, in his mind, is not sellable.

Mayrose: We try to partner with food banks as much as possible. We have established gleaning programs at the farmers markets we attend, and they now collect the leftover produce farmers want to donate. We want to expand on that to other markets in this area.

Where do you go from here?

Finnegan: I don’t believe we are ever going to eradicate hunger, because you would need to eradicate poverty…

Mayrose: We definitely want to grow as much food as we possibly can to meet demand, and provide more jobs training… We’re trying to expand our partners… And we’ll be doing more education. There is now so much more demand for workshops, education and training.

Rank: … [America’s] attitude toward poverty is really counterproductive. We think the individual is at fault, rather than saying, “There’s something structurally wrong here.” We have to think of it not as something that affects them, but as an issue that affects us all. We all pay for these high rates of poverty and hunger.

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