Blue apron full of holes and covered in cat food

Feb 13th, 2018 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
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Of course. Trump and his gang want to get rid of food stamps and replace them with a box of “staples” of the kind that exclude all perishables i.e. fresh vegetables and fruit, milk, cheese, eggs – you know, anything you’d actually want to eat.

The Trump administration wants to slash food aid to low-income families and make up the difference with a box of canned goods — a change that Office of Management and budget director Mick Mulvaney described in a Monday briefing as a “Blue Apron-type program.”

“What we do is propose that for folks who are on food stamps, part — not all, part — of their benefits come in the actual sort of, and I don’t want to steal somebody’s copyright, but a Blue Apron-type program where you actually receive the food instead of receive the cash,” Mulvaney said. “It lowers the cost to us because we can buy [at wholesale prices] whereas they have to buy it at retail. It also makes sure they’re getting nutritious food. So we’re pretty excited about that.”

What a grotesque lie. A box of canned goods is nothing like Blue Apron and it’s also far from the best way to get nutritious food.

On Monday, the Trump administration proposed cutting food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, by $17 billion in 2019 and more than $213 billion over the next decade. The dramatic reductions came as part of a budget proposal that made sweeping, across-the-board cuts to popular safety net programs,including federal housing subsidies and Medicaid.

This is who and what they are: make the poor poorer and the rich richer. That’s their emaciated version of A Better World.

[U]nder the Trump proposal, which the Agriculture Department has dubbed “America’s Harvest Box,” all households receiving more than $90 per month in benefits — 81 percent of SNAP households overall — would begin receiving about half their benefits in the form of government-purchased, nonperishable food items.

Those foods would include shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruits and vegetables, according to the USDA. The department estimates that it could supply these goods at about half the cost of retail, slashing the cost of SNAP while still feeding the hungry.

“USDA America’s Harvest Box is a bold, innovative approach to providing nutritious food to people who need assistance feeding themselves and their families – and all of it is home grown by American farmers and producers,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement. “It maintains the same level of food value as SNAP participants currently receive, provides states flexibility in administering the program, and is responsible to the taxpayers.”

No it doesn’t. Canned fruits and vegetables are no substitute for fresh ones.

Many anti-hunger advocates and analysts are equally skeptical of the proposed “food box,” which — if approved — would affect 16.4 million households. They say it’s unclear how USDA would deliver the boxes and how much that would cost. Equally unclear is whether USDA would allot the same foods to, say, an elderly diabetic and a family with young children.

“It boggles the mind how that would play out,” said Kathy Fisher, policy director at Philadelphia’s Coalition Against Hunger. “We know SNAP works now, when people can choose what they need. How they would distribute foods to people with specialized diets, or [to people in] rural areas … It’s very expensive and very complicated.”

It’s punitive. That’s the only point, really – telling poor people they’re worthless and bad and deserve nothing better than canned spinach and stale pasta.

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