Although she has been receiving federal food assistance for about 15 years, Madison resident Elizabeth Blume has never eaten government cheese. She heard horror stories from people who, though.
“There was just this big block of (…) something gelatinous that was orange,” Blume said.
Today, federal food programs no longer rely on surplus dairy products to feed food insecure Americans. Eligibility requirements have been loosened, there are easier payment options, and the current system provides users with more choice and dignity.
While Blume, 39, has more choice than early commodity recipients, it’s still difficult to maintain a balanced diet using food pantry donations and FoodShare benefits.
“Healthy food should be a basic right for everyone, but not only,” said Blume.
Before the pandemic, the $155 a month she received in FoodShare benefits made it difficult for her to buy food that fit her dietary needs. For example, she’s lactose intolerant – but she couldn’t always afford a $5 gallon of lactose-free milk.
Instead, Blume often sticks to cheap foods like rice and potatoes. Her meals vary depending on the time of the month and how much FoodShare money she has left; during her more difficult weeks, she eats only cereal and relies on food pantries for donations. She feels the consequences physically.
“You just feel more tired,” Blume said. “You feel sluggish. Your digestion is not so … up to par. (But) you have no choice.”
Insufficient benefits are not the only obstacle. Participants must navigate a convoluted process to apply for and maintain food assistance. And they continue to face social stigma for participating in a program that has been around for 90 years in one form or another.
A former chief official in charge of administering Wisconsin’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as FoodShare, says the process is hopelessly complex for the people it seeks to help.
“I am a well-educated and intelligent individual, (and) that was my job, and if I had to apply for benefits, I would have been challenged to do so,” said Rebecca McAtee, who ran the program at the Department of Community Services. Health from 2016 to 2021.
Benefits vary nationwide
Across the country, there is little consistency about who can receive benefits and how. Each state is different in how it counts assets, whether it requires work and how often recipients must report their income to renew benefits.
The Wisconsin program requires healthy recipients between the ages of 18 and 49 to work, do job training or complete job search activities for at least 80 hours a month. This may interest you : Blue Ridge Books celebrates 15 years. Exemptions apply for recipients who have a child in the household and for primary carers who are unable to care for themselves.
Since the pandemic, all work requirements have been lifted, but the Hunger Task Force Executive
Director Sherrie Tussler said they will probably be reinstated by the fall. The work requirement waiver expires on September 30, but can be extended after that date.
In Wisconsin, recipients cannot make more than 200% of the poverty level or risk losing FoodShare. A single recipient cannot earn more than $2,148 per month, or $25,776 per year, to qualify for assistance. A family of four cannot make more than $53,016 a year.
In the last two decades, the percentage of Wisconsinites who use FoodShare more than doubled. In 2001, 6.8% of state residents received FoodShare benefits. In 2020, it was 15.7%. The program had a recent high participation of 19.1% in 2013.
And state funding for Wisconsin’s FoodShare program in 2021 was $2.1 billion — by far the highest it’s been in a decade. This raised concerns from legislative Republicans that the state is spending too much and possibly disincentivizing work.
Frustration sparks food stamps program
The federal food assistance program has changed in several ways since it was implemented in 1933. During the Great Depression, America faced twin crises: famine and glut. This may interest you : Widespread mistrust in science: is the way we communicate to blame?. While poor families went hungry, crop prices fell and farmers were left with surplus food. In response, the federal government bought surplus food and distributed it to people in need.
But food, consisting of whatever farmers and manufacturers produced too much of, provided little nutritional balance. Families waited in line to receive large quantities of commodity food, from canned goods to perishable products including cheese and potatoes. They ate the same food for a month before the next box arrived.
Since the federal food assistance programs were first implemented, users like Blume have expressed dissatisfaction with them. Frustration from commodity recipients, along with lobbying from the food industry, led to the creation of the first food stamp program in 1939.
In the early days of the program, families would spend their monthly grocery budget to buy food stamps. A $10 food stamp purchase buys the family $10 in orange stamps, which can be used to buy any food. It also gives them $5 in blue stamps, which can only be used to buy surplus food designated by the government.
It also subjects users to social stigma.
“People would get paper food stamps, and they would go to the grocery store and be segregated in separate lines from people who were paying with cash or check,” recalled Tussler, the director of -Hunger Task Force.
The system publicly branded people as poor in an era when poverty was associated with moral failings. Decades later, the humiliation associated with poverty is still present, but it manifests itself in a more subtle way.
‘Doing the right thing’
Britnie Remer was angry at her single father for not “doing the right thing” to escape poverty. Read also : Meet the new Executive Director of the Arts of Great Falls. He worked several grueling jobs to provide for her on his own — but the family still needed FoodShare to make ends meet.
Growing up in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, Remer thought that if her father had worked harder, they wouldn’t have had to be poor. She said to herself, “I will make different choices, and (…) my life will be different and I will not fight.”
But in college, Remer realized it wasn’t that simple, falling into $40,000 of student loan debt while working two full-time jobs to stay afloat. Later, after years without benefits – and still no degree – she signed up for FoodShare again.
Today, Remer, who now lives in Wausau, is president of the Wisconsin Poor People’s Campaign, a community organization that fights systemic poverty. She realized that it wasn’t her father’s fault that he needed food assistance, and it wasn’t hers either. Instead, she said it was a symptom of a system that manufactures scarcity and “prioritises profit over human life.”
Although Remer understands this, she still suffered the social stigma of poverty. It was obvious at the grocery store, when her father would pay with an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card, the form of payment used by FoodShare recipients.
“You get people looking at you when you get the green card,” Remer said.
In 2002, the EBT system replaced physical food stamps, allowing recipients to pay for groceries with preloaded funds on a card. In 2004, Wisconsin renamed the stigma-laden food stamp program FoodShare.
Now, the card readers let the cashier know that the customer is paying with EBT. Cashiers process EBT payments differently than credit or debit purchases, but in most cases, customers don’t need to say out loud that they’re receiving cash assistance. -food.
Small changes like this help reduce the stigma surrounding food assistance, Blume said.
“It’s not that hard,” Blume said. “It’s not that much to do, just take small steps.”
‘So many loopholes’
Still, the road to less stigma and more choice has not been straight. In the decades after the first food stamp program expired during World War II, legislative efforts to revive it have failed to materialize. In 1944, Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette Jr. cosponsored a bill to reinstate a food stamp program.
This bill would have provided stamps to low-income families to purchase additional food needed to meet minimum nutritional requirements. But in the post-war era, food insecurity has ceased to be a legislative priority.
Laurie B. Green, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, thinks this is because the federal government did not recognize the famine domestically. American legislative efforts at the time focused on solving “world hunger,” ignoring similar issues at home.
“Hunger is a problem everywhere except the United States,” Green said. “The United States is immune.” Because of this misconception, it took until 1959 for Congress to reinstate food stamp legislation.
Twenty-five years after the first food stamps began, President Lyndon Johnson made it permanent in 1964 as part of the Democratic President’s War on Poverty. The Food Stamp Act also allowed users to buy a wide variety of food, not just surplus produce.
But, “there are so many loopholes in the Food Stamp program,” Green said. “It’s good for some people and it’s a disaster for others.”
The food stamp program was opt-in, meaning that states and counties could choose to issue food stamps, continue with the commodity system or provide no assistance at all. Even when state and local governments implemented the program, Green said individuals with no or irregular income often could not afford to buy stamps.
As a result, only 18% of America’s poor were served by food stamp or commodity programs in 1968, according to the influential report, Hunger, U.S.A.
Some progress towards greater accessibility was made in 1971, when the Republican administration of President Richard Nixon made food stamps free for those most in need. Three years later, it doubled the average benefits users received and ordered states to implement it.
But the new program had its drawbacks. Some participants had to pay up to 30% of their monthly income in advance in order to receive extra money in stamps. For those living in poverty, the process of obtaining federal benefits was still too expensive.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, remedied this issue by ending the purchase requirement for food stamps. Instead, recipients were given set amounts of food stamps based on income.
Despite improvements over the years, nearly 1 in 5 of those eligible for SNAP do not participate, according to the US Department of Agriculture. That number is lower for the working poor, defined as people who are eligible for SNAP benefits and live in a household where at least one person earns income. Less than three-quarters of those individuals receive SNAP benefits, according to the USDA.
Searching for solutions
During her time as director of FoodShare, McAtee realized the complex and often tedious nature of the application process. It requires extensive paperwork, interviews with a caseworker and notifications whenever a recipient’s monthly income rises above 130% of the poverty level – even if it’s just by a dollar.
Blume is familiar with this issue. Once, she was denied federal food aid because she exceeded the monthly income limit by $6. Remer, too, has been making barely enough money to qualify for FoodShare for years.
“It’s absolutely sickening, frustrating, heartbreaking,” Blume said.
FoodShare’s overly complicated bureaucracy makes it difficult to make substantial changes, McAtee said. It is frustrating for all parties involved, she said, adding that this was part of the reason she left.
“You can only bang your head against the wall so many times before you’re finally like, ‘This is too much,'” McAtee said.
Chris Kane, director of client services for the Society of St. Vincent DePaul Madison, noted the lack of government action in addressing food insecurity.
“It’s a battle,” Kane said. “We have to fight now with the system that is in place.”
Kane has worked for the San Vincent food pantry for 26 years. While Kane is happy to help people fight food insecurity, he doesn’t think it should be his job.
“I work and run a food pantry,” Kane said. “But I’ve always believed myself that it’s really the government that should take care of people, and make it so… that people don’t have to go to a charity place to get food.”
Pandemic prompts expansion
Just as food stamps began as an emergency response to the Great Depression, recent major changes in food assistance programs were prompted by another crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Trump administration had planned to cut federal food aid funding, but in response to the pandemic in 2020, Trump raised all families receiving SNAP to the maximum benefit level based on the level of ‘ income and the size of their family. Now, a family with no income with two adults and three children can receive $768 a month — about $240 more than before.
Blume had received an extra $95 a month, bringing her FoodShare benefits up to $250 a month total. It made a “huge difference,” she said.
The Trump administration also established the School Pandemic EBT program. This program gave benefits to families whose children could not receive a free or reduced lunch due to the closure of schools.
That’s why rather than increasing, food insecurity rates have remained largely the same during the pandemic, said Judi Bartfeld, project coordinator for the Food Security Project of Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said the “strong” federal response has kept people fed, despite widespread unemployment.
For Kane, the federal response to the pandemic made him realize that the government had the power to alleviate food insecurity all along, but previously chose not to.
Remer echoed the sentiment, saying it’s not just an unfortunate accident that some people are poor. Instead, she believes it is the direct result of a capitalist system that benefits the people in power.
“This is not just a product of what’s going on,” Remer said. “This is (…) an option.”
‘Divide of disbelief’
As some pandemic measures expired in 2021, President Joe Biden’s administration permanently increased average SNAP benefits to more than 25% above pre-pandemic levels, or a national average increase of about $36 per person per month – the largest permanent change to the program since then. 1979, when Carter eliminated the purchase requirement for food stamps.
But in Wisconsin, the pandemic-era policies that helped alleviate food insecurity may be short-lived. For example, Republican lawmakers introduced Assembly Bill 935 earlier this year, which would reinstate the work requirements to receive FoodShare.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a massive expansion in the size and scope of government welfare programs,” said Representative Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, in a heated hearing on AB 935. “We have more people on benefit programs than we did before the pandemic. … You can get all kinds of money in these programs now, with more people on them than ever before.”
Given the contentious split over food assistance policy, Bartfeld is doubtful that pandemic-related measures will become permanent fixtures of Wisconsin’s approach to addressing food insecurity.
“It’s hard to know what the policy directions are going to be in Wisconsin,” she said. “There is an interest in making access to food much more simplified and less restrictive, and there is an interest in really restrictive policies, and I don’t know that any of those are going to gain any traction right now.”
Despite an uphill political battle, McAtee has some ideas about how the program can be improved. Most families who are eligible for one federal assistance program like FoodShare are eligible for other benefits as well, but each program requires different information, which makes the process difficult for users, McAtee said. A more simplified, less complicated system would help.
Big changes like these won’t happen overnight, but McAtee sees states and local communities driving the change.
But Remer is less optimistic. She knows that food insecurity is a systemic issue, and to fix it, people will need to completely rework their understanding of poverty.
“There is no reason to even have FoodShare (…) when it comes down to it,” said Remer, because food insecurity should not exist in the first place – but “while this is in place , expansion helps.”
Tussler has seen a back-and-forth between lawmakers on food assistance policy since she started working for the Hunger Task Force more than two decades ago. She believes that ignorance – not politics – is the main obstacle to change.
“I’ve met Republicans who want to feed people and I’ve met Democrats who say, ‘They should all get a job,'” Tussler said. “But I think the divide is one of disbelief, and it’s one of lack of experience and lack of knowledge, because if you’ve ever been hungry, if you’ve ever gone weeks without having access to adequate food, don’t forget that.”
Former University of Wisconsin-Madison student Rachel Clark contributed to this report. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.
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Those making less than the maximum income requirements can get an EBT credit to buy food through Wisconsin’s FoodShare program at dhs.wisconsin.gov/foodshare/.
Use the 211 Wisconsin website to find a food pantry in your neighborhood by calling 2-1-1 or texting your ZIP code to TXT-211 (898-211). You may want to call ahead because the hours at the pantries may vary.
For those age 60 and older, Meals on Wheels delivers meals to you and anyone living with you who also qualifies. You can find the Meals on Wheels program nearest you by searching its website, mealsonwheelsamerica.org/find-meals. Requirements vary by program and areas served, and there are some dine-in options for mobile seniors.
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